Watching Grass Grow: Long-term Visual Navigation and Mission Planning for Autonomous Biodiversity Monitoring Article Swipe

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Matthew Gadd , Daniele De Martini , Luke Pitt , Wayne Tubby , Matthew Towlson , Chris Prahacs , Oliver Bartlett , John Jackson , Man Qi , Paul Newman , Andy Hector , Roberto Salguero‐Gómez , Nick Hawes ·

YOU? · · 2024 · Open Access · · DOI: https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2404.10446

We describe a challenging robotics deployment in a complex ecosystem to monitor a rich plant community. The study site is dominated by dynamic grassland vegetation and is thus visually ambiguous and liable to drastic appearance change over the course of a day and especially through the growing season. This dynamism and complexity in appearance seriously impact the stability of the robotics platform, as localisation is a foundational part of that control loop, and so routes must be carefully taught and retaught until autonomy is robust and repeatable. Our system is demonstrated over a 6-week period monitoring the response of grass species to experimental climate change manipulations. We also discuss the applicability of our pipeline to monitor biodiversity in other complex natural settings.

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Environmental Science

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Term (time) Biodiversity Environmental resource management Business Computer science Remote sensing Environmental science Geography Ecology Biology Physics Quantum mechanics

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Type: preprint
Language: en
Landing Page: http://arxiv.org/abs/2404.10446
PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.10446
OA Status: green
Cited By: 2
Related Works: 10
OpenAlex ID: https://openalex.org/W4394906323

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2404.10446

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Title: Watching Grass Grow: Long-term Visual Navigation and Mission Planning for Autonomous Biodiversity Monitoring

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Type: preprint

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Language: en

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Publication year: 2024

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Publication date: 2024-04-16

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Authors: Matthew Gadd, Daniele De Martini, Luke Pitt, Wayne Tubby, Matthew Towlson, Chris Prahacs, Oliver Bartlett, John Jackson, Man Qi, Paul Newman, Andy Hector, Roberto Salguero‐Gómez, Nick Hawes

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Landing page: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.10446

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PDF URL: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.10446

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Concepts: Term (time), Biodiversity, Environmental resource management, Business, Computer science, Remote sensing, Environmental science, Geography, Ecology, Biology, Physics, Quantum mechanics

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Cited by: 2

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Related works (count): 10

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