Related papers: MapForest: A Modular Field Robotics System for For…
The stability and ability of an ecosystem to withstand climate change is directly linked to its biodiversity. Dead trees are a key indicator of overall forest health, housing one-third of forest ecosystem biodiversity, and constitute 8%of…
Mobile robotic gas distribution mapping (GDM) provides critical situational awareness during emergency responses to hazardous gas releases. However, most systems still rely on teleoperation, limiting scalability and response speed.…
Tree roots detection is a popular application of the Ground-penetrating radar (GPR). Normally, the ground surface above the tree roots is assumed to be flat, and standard processing methods based on hyperbolic fitting are applied to the…
Autonomous aerial navigation in dense natural environments remains challenging due to limited visibility, thin and irregular obstacles, GNSS-denied operation, and frequent perceptual degradation. This work presents an improved deep…
Deforestation estimation and fire detection in the Amazon forest poses a significant challenge due to the vast size of the area and the limited accessibility. However, these are crucial problems that lead to severe environmental…
Close-range laser scanning provides detailed 3D captures of forest stands but requires efficient software for processing 3D point cloud data and extracting individual trees. Although recent studies have introduced deep learning methods for…
In the context of autonomous robots, one of the most important tasks is to prevent potential damage to the robot during navigation. For this purpose, it is often assumed that one must deal with known probabilistic obstacles, then compute…
Robust and persistent localisation is essential for ensuring the safe operation of autonomous vehicles. When operating in large and diverse urban driving environments, autonomous vehicles are frequently exposed to situations that violate…
This research is motivated by a scenario where a group of UAVs is assigned to map an unknown scalar field, with the imperative of maintaining a safe distance from the sources of the field to evade detection or damage. The location of the…
This work intends to lay the foundations for identifying the prevailing forest types and the delineation of forest units within private forest inventories in the Autonomous Province of Trento (PAT), using currently available remote sensing…
This article presents HOTFLoc++, an end-to-end hierarchical framework for LiDAR place recognition, re-ranking, and 6-DoF metric localisation in forests. Leveraging an octree-based transformer, our approach extracts features at multiple…
We present a texture network called Deep Encoding Pooling Network (DEP) for the task of ground terrain recognition. Recognition of ground terrain is an important task in establishing robot or vehicular control parameters, as well as for…
We present a highly detailed instance segmentation model for delineating individual tree crowns in natural broadleaf forests using aerial imagery acquired by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Tree crown delineation in broadleaf forests is…
Detailed forest inventories are critical for sustainable and flexible management of forest resources, to conserve various ecosystem services. Modern airborne laser scanners deliver high-density point clouds with great potential for…
Savannahs are vital ecosystems whose sustainability is endangered by the spread of woody plants. This research targets the accurate mapping of fractional woody cover (FWC) at the species level in a South African savannah, using EnMAP…
Trees Outside Forests (TOF) play an important role in agricultural landscapes by supporting biodiversity, sequestering carbon, and regulating microclimates. Yet, most studies have treated TOF as a single class or relied on rigid rule-based…
Terrain adaptation is an essential capability for a ground robot to effectively traverse unstructured off-road terrain in real-world field environments such as forests. However, the expected robot behaviors generated by terrain adaptation…
The dynamic and heterogeneous nature of agricultural fields presents significant challenges for object detection and localization, particularly for autonomous mobile robots that are tasked with surveying previously unseen unstructured…
Forests are frequently impacted by climate conditions, vegetation density, and intricate terrain and geology, which contribute to natural disasters. Personnel engaged in or supporting rescue operations in such environments rely on robust…
This work describes the implementation of a simple and computationally efficient Intelligent Navigation System (INS) for autonomous systems used in areas where human access is impossible. The system uses Laser Range Finder (LRF) readings as…