The Safeforest project solution consists in the use of a drone and a ground robot to clear the land, acting in terms of prevention and fight against forest fires. For this robotic system to reach the market, there is still work to be done.
The two devices collaborate with each other. “The drone has a mobility capacity and degrees of freedom that a terrestrial robot does not have,” explains Micael Couceiro, general director of Ingeniarius, the company leading the project.
“Our objective was to use the drone to acquire a series of relevant information, namely maps, to then provide these maps with other relevant semantic information, for example, the areas through which the terrestrial robot can circulate or not, the areas that has fuel to be removed or not”.
Subsequently, the coordinator continues, the terrestrial robot receives this information and “operates autonomously” cleaning the vegetation, considered forest fuel.
“We destroy this vegetation, and when we destroy this vegetation, the particles that are left in the soil have almost no oxygen between them. Therefore, the combustion is much more reduced and that is the great objective of this type of technology”.
The demonstration of the equipment took place this Thursday in Coimbra, within the framework of a workshop, promoted by the University of Coimbra, dedicated to the Safeforest -Semi-Autonomous Robotic System for Forest Cleanse and Fire Prevention project. The objective is the development of innovative technologies for the prevention of forest fires, with an emphasis on mobile robotics.
This project is led by a consortium formed by the companies Ingeniarius and SILVAPOR, in collaboration with the Association for the Development of Industrial Aerodynamics (ADAI) and the Institute of Systems and Robotics (ISR) of the Faculty of Sciences and Technology of the University of Coimbra, as well as with the American Carnegie Mellon University (CMU).
For Micael Couceiro “there are many” added values of these solutions, noting that “with climate change, experts in the field are realizing that forest fires start earlier and earlier.”
And if before the fires started in June, “now we have situations in April, sometimes even in March, in which we have forest fires.” “And this will continue to get worse,” he adds.
“The time we have to carry out this preventive maintenance is beginning to reduce. And the human resources we have to carry it out do not increase. What we are proposing is, in fact, to develop a set of autonomous and semi-autonomous organizations. that they can collaborate with these resources to expand the potential we have to carry out this prevention”, says the coordinator.
Regarding market entry, Micael Couceiro acknowledges that these solutions are “not yet” ready, and points out that it is a “research project”. On a scale of 1 to 9, and if you were to assign a number, the coordinator would give you “five, six.”
“We still have maturing work to do, that is, in the perception layer, which is the most fundamental layer of the whole system, which is the ability of the robot to identify which vegetation should be removed and which vegetation should be kept.”
Source: TSF
