TED Global speaker/drone ecologist Lian Pin Koh and fellow researcher Serge Wich share how drones are playing an important role in helping conservationists survey and map ecologically sensitive parts of the globe.

Global land-use changes continue to be a major driver of biodiversity loss and greenhouse gas emissions. Remote sensing technology is increasingly used to assess changes in land use, species distributions and carbon stocks. However, satellite and airborne sensors can be prohibitively costly and inaccessible for researchers, or they may not have the required spatial resolution. Recently UAVs have been used by conservation researchers and practitioners across various parts of the world. These inexpensive UAVs typically cost less than $4000 US, and have been dubbed ‘Conservation Drones’. The drones are equipped with cameras to record videos at up to 1080 pixel resolution (high definition), and acquire aerial photographs of <2 cm pixel resolution. Aerial photographs can be stitched together to produce near real-time geo-referenced land use/cover maps of surveyed areas and 3D models.

This post is part of Robohub’s TED Global 2013 coverage.

Why did we develop Conservation Drones?
Globally, biodiversity continues to decline, and a disproportional amount of this decline occurs in the tropics where the majority of global biodiversity is found. One urgent challenge for conservationists is to be able to accurately assess and monitor changes in forest cover, species distributions and population dynamics. To obtain such data, conservationists currently rely on satellite-based remote sensing for mapping and monitoring land use changes, and on ground surveys to determine and monitor species distribution and population dynamics. Although low-resolution satellite images are freely available at specific time intervals, it is often prohibitively expensive to obtain sub-meter resolution images. Yet, such high-resolution data are often critical for accurately detecting and tracking land use change at the landscape scale. Furthermore, large portions of the humid tropics are often obscured from remote sensing satellites due to persistent cloud cover. As such, cloud-free satellite images for a specific time period/series and location are often not readily available.

A second major conservation challenge concerns assessment and monitoring of biodiversity. Currently, this is largely achieved through ground surveys, which are often time-consuming, financially expensive, and logistically challenging in remote areas. As a result, surveys are not conducted at the frequency required to monitor population trends, and some remote tropical forests have never been surveyed for biodiversity due to difficult and inaccessible terrain.

An additional challenge for conservationists is the illegal encroachment into protected areas and illegal hunting of prized animals, such as tiger, rhinos, and elephants. The areas that need to be surveyed in these cases are large, and current ground and manned aircraft surveys do not occur regularly enough to be able to effectively reduce illegal activities.

To address these challenges, we are developing the use of inexpensive, autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles for surveying and mapping forests, biodiversity and potential illegal activities – Conservation Drones.

What are Conservation Drones?
Although we have been using several airframes for our drones since we started, the core part of the system has remained the same. The core is an autopilot system (APM) developed by an online community (diydrones.com). By combining the APM with open-source mission planner software (APM Planner), we convert off-the-shelf model airplanes into drones. We use inexpensive airframes so that the technology can be accessible to conservation organizations and researchers, who often do not have the funding to acquire drones and maintain them.

The sensors
We have equipped our drones with various camera systems for still-photography and videography. We have been mainly using the Canon SX230 with a build-in GPS so that all photos are geo-tagged. We replace the original firmware of the Canon camera with a Canon Hack Development Kit. This ‘hacked’ firmware allows us to implement a customized intervalometer script to command the camera to take photographs at user-specified time intervals (e.g., every 3 seconds). This script also allows the user to define several other parameters including: i) time-delay before the camera begins taking pictures, ii) focal length of camera lens, and iii) time before camera automatically shuts down and retracts its lens.

We also use video cameras such as the GoPro Hero and the ContourGPS. These take high definition videos at 1080 x 720 pixels. We attached these cameras underneath or on the side of the fuselage. Using the APM Planner, we program the flight path of each mission by clicking on waypoints in a Google satellite map interface. The drone can be programmed to take off and land autonomously, and circle over any waypoint for a specified number of turns or duration. Users could also program other flight parameters such as ground speed and altitude of each waypoint.

What have we achieved so far?
Since our start in January of this year we have made over 200 conservation drone flights in several countries including Switzerland, Netherlands, Indonesia, Malaysia and Nepal, Congo, Gabon, Madagascar, United States, and Greenland. These flights have provided us a large amount of photos and videos, which we have examined with respect to our three main initial goals. We describe these below.

Mapping land use
So far we have been able to take sets of high-resolution photos of various areas that can be stitched together into a geo-referenced mosaic so that it can be used in geographic information system software. Such mosaics give detailed information on type of land use, agriculture, and settlements. In addition, the images can be used to create three-dimensional models of the areas that were covered during missions due to the overlap between the photos. Such models can potentially be used to calculate a number of characteristics of different land uses such as tree height and tree density.

Biodiversity
The high-resolution nature of our images have also allowed us to detect various wildlife species on our photos or their signs including orangutans and their nests, elephants, rhinos, forest buffaloes, and even turtle nests. The next important step for our work is to derive the distribution and density of these wildlife species based on drone images so that this technique can become a standard application for conservation workers. To achieve this goal, we are collaborating with colleagues, including Prof. Dr. Andreas Krause at ETH Zurich to automate the detection of orangutan nests.

Illegal activities
For conservation workers, having access to up-to-date information on illegal logging in protected areas and poaching are extremely important. The video and photos taken from the drones can be used to detect such these illegal activities. For example, geo-tagged drone images of recently logged areas could help authorities track down illegal loggers and provide evidence for their conviction. When poachers are in a forest, they often create campfires for cooking or smoking the bush-meat from animals they have hunted. The detection of smoke rising above a forest would thus be very useful to locate these poachers. Conservation drones equipped with a high definition video camera could facilitate the detection of smoke many kilometers away. Furthermore, a ‘live’ video link would allow rangers to patrol the forest in real time, and react immediately when needed.

Plans for the future
Conservation Drones is a constant work in progress. We are currently working with other colleagues to explore the use of our drones as a ‘data mule’. For example, drones equipped with a scanning radio receiver might be able to triangulate the location of forest animals that have been tagged with a radio collar. This would be a much more efficient way of locating these radio-collared animals than the traditional method of walking the forest on foot with a cumbersome radio antenna.

We are also working with WWF Nepal and India to equip drones with thermal imaging cameras. These camera systems would be able to detect heat emitting objects from the ground, which would help rangers locate both wildlife and poachers at night.

Further Reading
Koh, L. H., Wich, S. A. (2012) Dawn of drone ecology: low-cost autonomous aerial vehicles for conservation. Tropical Conservation Science 5: 121-132.

www.conservationdrones.org

See all the posts in Robohub’s TED Global 2013 coverage.

Check out live tweets, amazing photos, TED blog posts and awesome video coverage of the session Those Flying Things at this year’s TED Global, featuring the work of automation and controls expert Raffaello D’Andrea, and drone ecologist Lian Pin Koh. We will be adding new material here as it becomes available, so check back soon. Photo credit: James Duncan Davidson.

This post is part of Robohub’s TED Global 2013 coverage.

Update: TED video | Raffaello D’Andrea: The astounding athletic power of quadcopters

Update: TED video | Timelapse: Building an arena for flying robots
See the full TED Blog post for more about how James Duncan Davidson made the video.

Tweets about “quadrotor OR quadrocopter OR drone OR quadcopter OR quadcoptor OR quadrocoptor OR D’Andrea OR Raffaello OR Lian OR Pin OR Koh OR robot OR Suarez #TEDGlobal”

In his TED Global talk titled “Machine Athleticism” Raffaello D’Andrea shows how he uses control algorithms to push quadrotors to perform at their physical limits. Instead of relying on slides, D’Andrea (who is well-known for his quadrotor demos) demonstrates his flying machines live as they toss a ball, balance a poll, serve a glass of water without spilling a drop, and even fly with their props cut off. In his own words, D’Andrea’s talk is about “the ability of machines to perform dynamic feats that fully exploit their physical capabilities.”

Check out official TED blogger Kate Torgovnick for her coverage of Raffaello D’Andrea’s talk.

See all the posts in Robohub’s TED Global 2013 coverage.

A quadrocopter swoops through the air to serve a glass of water without spilling a drop. Another gets two of its propellers cut off, yet still easily flies across the arena. “It looks like magic!” says ETH Zurich‘s Raffaello D’Andrea, but it took a lot of research, hard work and planning to bring this ‘magic trick’ to TED Global.
This post is part of Robohub’s TED Global 2013 coverage.

D’Andrea’s talk is about “Machine Athleticism” — the ability of machines to perform dynamic feats that fully exploit their physical capabilities. Part  of a session called “Those Flying Things” (which also features the work of drone ecologist Lian Pin Koh, airborne logistics activist Andreas Raptopoulos and sci-fi author Daniel Suarez), D’Andrea delves into what it takes to make a machine athlete:

We use something broadly called Model Based Design: we first build physics-based models that roughly capture the behavior of the machine; these models are then leveraged by a branch of mathematics called Control Theory to synthesize algorithms for controlling them.

He goes on to show a series of pretty amazing quadrotor feats that would be impossible without sophisticated automatic feedback. TED just posted an update on their blog about the demo here, and we will link to the video of the talk as soon as it goes online.

Clearly a lot of work has gone on behind the scenes to get D’Andrea and his team to TED. It’s taken years of research and a whole crew of PhD and Master students to develop the infrastructure and algorithms that make this demonstration possible — and that was just to get to the point where they could do the demos in-house.

D’Andrea and his team usually research and demo their quadrotor tricks at the ETH Flying Machine Arena — a 10x10x10m airspace dedicated to the study of control algorithms, and featuring a high-precision motion capture system, a wireless communication network, and custom software for executing estimation and control. Though the FMA normally lives at its home base at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, it was designed from the outset to be portable, and TED Global is not the first time it has taken to the road:
In 2011 they set up at the FRAC Centre in Orléans, France to create a six metre-high tower – the first architectural installation built by flying machines (see video). Last year the team showed their work at the world’s largest industrial fair, Germany’s Hannover Messe and at Google’s annual flagship conference Google IO in San Francisco.

Still, it takes a lot of time and careful planning to recreate the set up at a new site, and on this occasion they were planning a video shoot as well as a live audience. Says Mark Mueller, one of the team members onsite at TED, “Since April, all of us here have been working full-time, 100% on TED,” referring to all the various administrative hurdles they had to cross, such as planning logistics and agreeing on the space, in addition to rehearsing the demo itself. And then there was the packing to do: “It boils down to fifteen cases, boxes and bags,” says Dario Brescianinini, another member of the crew.

D’Andrea and his team arrived in Edinburgh, Scotland (the host city of TED Global 2013) late Saturday afternoon ahead of most other TED speakers, and started setting up almost right away in a dedicated room where the talk was filmed and where all their demonstrations will take place throughout the week. According to Brescianini and Mueller, it took about three-and-a-half hours to get the first quadrotor hovering. On Sunday they rehearsed the talk — and especially the transitions between each demo — in preparation for the video shoot, which was done in advance of the live talk.

Despite a few hiccups (two quads were damaged during setup and some repairs had to be done on the fly), Monday’s shoot went pretty smoothly. “It took about two-and-a-half hours, but we did one talk without breaks and had most of the things filmed after twenty-five minutes,” says Brescianini. It was a busy set, with fifteen TED crew members, seven people from D’Andrea’s team and one photographer. All in all, it took two fixed cameras (4k HD), one Steadicam, and three GoPros (one in the corner on the floor, one on the ceiling facing downwards, and one flying GoPro attached to a quad) to document D’Andrea’s TED talk. An additional camera shot a “making of” video as well. “It’s pretty busy, and we’re all really relieved after the successful filming.”

Want to learn more?
Check out the pages of ETH Zurich’s Flying Machine Arena team and more Robohub articles on how quadrocopters learn acrobatic maneuvers, cooperate to throw and catch balls, perfect air racing, and throw and catch an inverted pendulum.

Full disclosure: Markus Waibel works with Raff D’Andrea and the Flying Machine Arena team at ETH Zurich’s Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control.

See all the posts in Robohub’s TED Global 2013 coverage.

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• Three new quadrotor videos demonstrate agile control and the power of machine learning
• Live at TED Global 2013: Tweets, photos and video for quadrotor fans
• Video: Throwing and catching an inverted pendulum – with quadrocopters
• Quadrocopters learn from prior experience to improve slalom flying

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