UAV Platforms for Data Acquisition and Intervention Practices in Forestry: Towards More Intelligent Applications

Abstract

Unmanned air vehicle (UAV) systems for performing forestry applications have expanded in recent decades and have great economic benefits. They are validated to be more appealing than traditional platforms in various aspects, such as repeat rate, spatial resolution, and accuracy. This paper consolidates the state-of-the-art unmanned systems in the forestry field with a major focus on UAV systems and heterogeneous platforms, which are applied in a variety of forestry applications, such as wood production, tree quantification, disease control, wildfire management, wildlife conservation, species classification, etc. This review also studies practical applications under multiple forestry environments, including wild and managed forests, grassland, urban green parks, and stockyards. Special forest environments and terrains present customized demands for unmanned systems. The challenges of unmanned systems deployment are analyzed from environmental characterization, maneuverability and mobility improvement, and global regulatory interpretation. To better apply UAV systems into forestry, future directions are analyzed in terms of mobility enhancement and customized sensory adaption, which need to be further developed for synchronizing all possible agents into automatic functioning systems for forestry exploration.

Agent-based Modeling of Sustainable Forestry Activities

“…Алферьева [4]. Еще более детально и уже применительно к лесному хозяйству советуем обратиться к свежей статье коллектива китайско-американских ученых, опубликованной в журнале Aerospace MDPI [37].…”

Robotics in Forest Inventories: SPOT’s First Steps

“…Extensive research conducted in recent decades has focused on the use of unmanned platforms in forestry [1][2][3]. The rapid progress in the forestry industry has generated growing global interest in deployment of unmanned vehicle systems with different levels of automation [4,5].…”

“…The rapid progress in the forestry industry has generated growing global interest in deployment of unmanned vehicle systems with different levels of automation [4,5]. Sun et al [3], identified two types of forestry unmanned platforms (FUPs) that serve different forestry applications: unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) and unmanned air vehicles (UAVs). Both platforms have been increasingly used in recent years to acquire different types of data and to perform various forestry tasks [3,6].…”

“…Sun et al [3], identified two types of forestry unmanned platforms (FUPs) that serve different forestry applications: unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) and unmanned air vehicles (UAVs). Both platforms have been increasingly used in recent years to acquire different types of data and to perform various forestry tasks [3,6].…”