Episode 2 — A Day in the Life of an Autonomous Drone:

Digitising the Forest

The sun rises and the sleepy eyes of our drone adjust to a new day. He is feeling good, having been honoured with the task of surveying and digitising an area the size of over 50 football pitches in the French region of Brittany.

It is going to be a big day.

With landing and charging stations positioned throughout the area, placed as such to maximise flight efficiency, it is viable for our four-winged friend to cover the whole area without a single ounce of help from his human cousins.

The task has been requested by through the Flyingcarpet Network by EcoTree , a project that incentivises consumers to purchase trees for the sake of ecological preservation. They are working with several partners including Fransylva and the Ministry of Agriculture in France to collect valuable analytics of the forest. Having submitted a service request through the Flyingcarpet protocol, they can now sit back and watch as the drone springs into action — after checking his to-do list:

• Register various tree species
• Register GPS coordinates
• Calculate density of the area
• Calculate cubage of a plot
• Detect any diseased trees
• Calculate carbon capture
• Register height of trees
• Detect wetland
• Carry out cadastral survey/vectorised surface survey
• Detect game and bird populations

Ten minutes later he has mapped 1350 trees and counting; 17 have been identified as having abnormalities (rot, degradation, tampering etc) and as the GPS coordinates of each tree have been monitored, these specific trees can have specialists deployed to ensure such anomalies aren’t spreading.

The main purpose of this expedition is to test purpose-built algorithms that aim to generate data that is usable by organisations such the Regional Centre for Forest Property (CRPF) — a public entity that EcoTree also work with.

The task is to be repeated autonomously once a quarter to track changes in the data sets and to analyse any patterns that emerge. At which point the PoC data will be analysed by Ecotree, and their french forestry and agricultural partners, with the intention of identifying major areas of improvement in preservation for forestry areas across France.

After the PoC has been completed, these parties will be assessing the feasibility of spreading to new areas of forestry across France, currently focusing on Ile de France, Sarthe and Limousin as well as Brittany.

Ecotree co-founder, Baudouin Vercken, says that the most exciting part of the project is to “be able to boost a sector as old as the world…with tools as young as big data.”

Our robotic cousin has a lot of work to do…

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Follow our progress on our Telegram Channel!