Large-scale Autonomous Flight with Real-time Semantic SLAM under Dense Forest Canopy

The Kumar Lab is developing autonomous flying robots that can fly under forest canopies and between rows of trees in farms to provide tree growers and farmers with the necessary information for operations in agriculture and forestry. Specifically, robots explore in unstructured, GPS-denied environments without radio signals and create semantic maps. They can also estimate the carbon in forests, which is an important metric in environmental monitoring. Recent work in autonomous under-the-canopy flight and semantic mapping can be seen in this video. The lab maintains active collaborations with the IoT4Ag center and Treeswift, a spin-out from the lab.”