Ecology Monitoring in Forests with Aerial Robots
Research into remote sensing tools for environmentalmonitoring is an essential aspect for ensuring a healthy anthriving biosphere under the canopy, but also for preventingforest-related hazards from occurring. The challenges associatedwith forestry robotics are posed by the environment itself, asforests are wide-spread areas with a high density of obstacles andcomplex geometries to navigate in. Multirotors are UnmannedAerial Vehicles (UAVs) that offer great agility and an unboundedoperational workspace within a compact size. These features maketheir deployment in such wide areas most suitable for depositingwireless sensor networks that provide real-time forest monitoring.Hence, within this paper we propose a novel paradigm to ecologymonitoring which exploits UAVs as the carriers of environmentalsensors to be deployed in forests. Three different methodologies andsystems are hereby presented and discussed for sensor placementtasks, leveraging bespoke design, navigation and control techniques.