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Protecting and restoring forest ecosystems has become an important conservation issue. Although various robots have been used for field data collection to protect forest ecosystems, the complex terrain and dense canopy make the data…
There are various desired capabilities to create aerial forest-traversing robots capable of monitoring both biological and abiotic data. The features range from multi-functionality, robustness, and adaptability. These robots have to weather…
Perching with winged Unmanned Aerial Vehicles has often been solved by means of complex control or intricate appendages. Here, we present a simple yet novel method that relies on passive wing morphing for crash-landing on trees and other…
Over the past decades, quadcopters have been investigated, due to their mobility and flexibility to operate in a wide range of environments. They have been used in various areas, including surveillance and monitoring. During a mission,…
The potential of tree planting as a natural climate solution is often undermined by inadequate monitoring of tree planting projects. Current monitoring methods involve measuring trees by hand for each species, requiring extensive cost,…
Tree perception is an essential building block toward autonomous forestry operations. Current developments generally consider input data from lidar sensors to solve forest navigation, tree detection and diameter estimation problems. Whereas…
We present a novel method of integrating image-based measurements into a drone navigation system for the automated inspection of wind turbines. We take a model-based tracking approach, where a 3D skeleton representation of the turbine is…
Perching allows unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to reduce energy consumption, remain anchored for surface sampling operations, or stably survey their surroundings. Previous efforts for perching on vertical surfaces have predominantly…
Autonomous Nano Aerial Vehicles have been increasingly popular in surveillance and monitoring operations due to their efficiency and maneuverability. Once a target location has been reached, drones do not have to remain active during the…
Drones will play an essential role in human-machine teaming in future search and rescue (SAR) missions. We present a first prototype that finds people fully autonomously in densely occluded forests. In the course of 17 field experiments…
This paper presents a novel trajectory planning method for aerial perching. Compared with the existing work, the terminal states and the trajectory durations can be adjusted adaptively, instead of being determined in advance. Furthermore,…
Tree search algorithms, such as branch-and-bound, are the most widely used tools for solving combinatorial and nonconvex problems. For example, they are the foremost method for solving (mixed) integer programs and constraint satisfaction…
This paper considers the problem of finding a landing spot for a drone in a dense urban environment. The conflicting requirement of fast exploration and high resolution is solved using a multi-resolution approach, by which visual…
Manual pruning of radiata pine trees presents significant safety risks due to their substantial height and the challenging terrains in which they thrive. To address these risks, this research proposes the development of a drone-based…
Flapping wings are a bio-inspired method to produce lift and thrust in aerial robots, leading to quiet and efficient motion. The advantages of this technology are safety and maneuverability, and physical interaction with the environment,…
There is a rising interest in mapping trees using satellite or aerial imagery, but there is no standardized evaluation protocol for comparing and enhancing methods. In dense canopy areas, the high variability of tree sizes and their spatial…
This paper shows the achievement of a sensing and navigation system of aerial robot for measuring location and size of trees in a forest environment autonomously. Although forestry is an important industry in Japan, the working population…
Swarms of drones offer an increased sensing aperture, and having them mimic behaviors of natural swarms enhances sampling by adapting the aperture to local conditions. We demonstrate that such an approach makes detecting and tracking…
Localization in challenging, natural environments such as forests or woodlands is an important capability for many applications from guiding a robot navigating along a forest trail to monitoring vegetation growth with handheld sensors. In…
This paper presents an automated pipeline for detecting tree whorls in proximally laser scanning data using a pose-estimation deep learning model. Accurate whorl detection provides valuable insights into tree growth patterns, wood quality,…