How Flying Robots Might Prevent Deforestation - Summary & Analysis DRAFT #4

 By Chen Jian Yeow

Summary-Analysis

 Draft #4

4th April 2021

According to the article "The Flying Robot Might Prevent Deforestation" (Peck, 2012), flying drones are key in acting as a lookout to prevent and stop illegal activities in a forest. Illegal deforestation and fires were some of the events affecting the rainforest in Brazil. Peck suggests that drug trafficking and mining have also made to be easier due to low-level surveillance in the rainforest. Peck presents the use of Quadrotor drones to navigate through the rainforests, acting as a lookout for illegal activities that are happening. Peck underlines the fact that Quadrotor drones in 2012 were capable to fly from side to side, avoid obstacles and even learn and adapt to changes on the go. Additionally, Quadrotor drones can sense the environment without direct connection to other drones. The goal of this project is to reduce or stop illegal activities. However, one key concern would be that the drones could potentially cause harm to the wildlife that they are supposed to protect.

While Quadrotor drones are effective at detecting illegal activities in the day, they would be ineffective in doing so at night. Having improvements in the lights, audio, and camera technology on the current iteration will help in its ability to do so.

An improvement on the Quadrotor drones could be by implementing thermographic cameras on the drone. With this new feature, the drone could then spot movement through heat signatures in the dense forest finding illegal activities taking place. According to Schedl, Kurmi, and Bimber (2020), drones using airborne optical sectioning can find humans in the forest at a rate of 90% by using a thermographic camera and "machine learning algorithm trained to identify humans". According to a Flir webpage (2020), Professor Bimber mentions this technology could prove beneficial to maintaining the wildlife and ecosystem in the forest. Additional uses like tracking the wildlife population as well as surveying the forest's agriculture are some of the uses apart from its main function for searching for illegal activities. With this enhancement to the quadrotor drones, they will be able to improve the rate of successfully detecting illegal activities as well as gathering additional studies on conserving the forest's wildlife.

Another improvement on the Quadrotor drone would be by mounting microphones on it. This new feature could then be used to listen for specific sounds that are foreign to nature, relaying important timely information authorities to activities in the forest. According to Peters (2019), Topher White mentioned that after his prototype worked on detecting illegal logging, and is now able to "detect new types of sounds" like "trucks, gunshots, and boats". At night these Quadrotor drones could be placed in prebuild strategic platforms around the forest canopies to detect these activities.

Another useful improvement would be attaching high lumen lights on the Quadrotor drones. The high lumen lights could light up the forest floor where most illegal activities occur, this would further assist the authorities to locate the participants of these illegal activities. In the situation where the fire is used to clear the forest, the high lumen lights can also assist by providing increased visibility to the areas. According to the Dronefly infographic (2017), floodlights on drones are able "to search and rescue victims" implying they could spot illegal activities in the forests too.

The improved Quadrotor drones would alert the authorities to more illegal activities happening throughout the night, assisting to improve visibility when searching for evading perpetrators or firefighting efforts. These improvements to the current iteration of the Quadrotor drones will contribute more to the prevention of deforestation.

References

Dronefly. (2017). Firefighting infographic. https://www.dronefly.com/firefighting-drones-drones-in-the-field-infographic

Flir. (2020, December). Researchers Develop Search and Rescue Technology That Sees Through Forest with Thermal Imaging. https://www.flir.com/discover/cores-components/researchers-develop-search-and-rescue-technology-that-sees-through-forest-with-thermal-imaging/

Peck, M.(2012). How Flying Robots Might Prevent Deforestation, Mashable., http://mashable.com/2012/03/20/flying-robots-deforestation/

Peters, A. (2019, November 27). This network of microphones listens for chainsaws of illegal loggers in the rain forest. FastCompany. https://www.fastcompany.com/90435386/this-network-of-microphones-listens-for-the-chainsaws-of-illegal-loggers-in-the-rainforest

Schedl, D.C., Kurmi, I. & Bimber, O. (2020). Search and rescue with airborne optical sectioning. Nature Marine Intelligence 2, 783-790. https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-020-00261-3

Dronefly.com introduces an infographic for firefighting drone use applications. (2017, December 19). Suasnews.  https://www.suasnews.com/2017/12/dronefly-com-introduces-infographic-firefighting-drone-use-applications/