Design Summary & Analysis Draft 4
In the article “How Flying Robots Might Prevent
Deforestation,” Peck (2012) mentioned the purpose, features and effectiveness
of quadrotors, and mainly focused on them being “sentinels of crucial
environmental protection”. These “miniature flying robots” were programmed to
inspect the surroundings of the rainforest independently, providing advanced
feedback for unlicensed activities and diminishing the desire of those people
who considered carrying out unlawful acts such as "cutting down trees and
drug trafficking". According to Peck, Vijay Kumar, the developer of the
Quadrotors, highlighted the robots’ ability to efficiently function together as
a team without a need for any communication. Furthermore, quadrotors were
equipped with “little rotor blades'' for easy gliding action, and the
programmed commands on the “onboard processor” would call for an immediate
response to any difference in their surroundings. According to Peck, Mario
Campos, a professor of computer science, claimed that although quadrotors were
deemed as valuable bots, we have to be mindful when utilising these robots
extensively as there could be a possibility of them endangering the wildlife.
Flying Robots are useful in guarding the forest against
deforestation and people trying to do illegal activities. While there are
clearly benefits to using these robots in guarding the forest against
deforestation and people, there are also some drawbacks.
One of the benefits of using drones in the forest is to
enable us to have a greater understanding of the forest through 3D mapping of
the terrain of the forest. This is done by flying the drones through the forest
to scan and capture the different features of the forest. After that, the
software will generate the 3D map of the forest based on the information
collected by the flying robots. An instance of the usage of the 3D map is the
planting of mangrove trees in Myanmar whereby biodegradable pods containing
fertiliser and germinated seeds were dropped into grounds with suitable
conditions by drones (Peters, 2019). According to Jackson (2020), a non-profit
organisation called Worldview International was only able to plant less than
"three square miles of mangrove saplings" prior to the adoption of
drones. Currently, the organisation's target is to be able to plant 400,000
trees per day with the assistance of drones. As a result of an increase in the
knowledge of the forest, the stakeholders, such as the government, researchers
and organisations can have an easier time for forest planning and conservation.
Another advantage of employing drones in the forest is for
detecting early forest fire so that necessary actions can be taken to reduce
the spread of forest fire swiftly and save as much of the ecosystem as
possible. Gan (2019) mentions that many forests in the world are burning. The
Amazon Rainforest had burned for more than three weeks, which caused damage to
the habitat of "10% of the world’s animal and plant species", Gan
says. Likewise, forest fire in many other places such as Canary Island, Siberia
and Alaska also caused large scale destruction to the forests. With the use of
drones in the forest, the drones are able to detect forest fire through smoke
sensors and images taken by the camera mounted on them (Cruz et al., 2016).
According to Cruz et al., forest fire detection from the images is done using
algorithms to analyse the red, green and blue colour components of the pixels
of the image. Hence, early detection of forest fire using flying robots is
extremely important to prevent a small fire from spreading into a large scale
forest fire which can cause irreversible damage to the forest.
Although there are
many advantages like those mention in the previous paragraphs, there are also
drawbacks to using drones in the forest. Since the drones are operating without
any human control, there will be a risk of them harming the ecosystem in the
forest if the drones were to malfunction as they can go out of control and
crash into anything. There was an incident in Switzerland where a delivery
drone crashed near a group of children even though an emergency parachute was
attached to it (Porter, 2019). Porter mentioned that during the emergency
landing, the connecting cord of the parachute was cut off by the drone, which
led to the crash. Therefore, it is important for developers that are developing
drones to be used in the forest to ensure that enough safety measures are
implemented on the drones such as being able to send a signal through the
system to alert the operator when the drone detects any glitch when flying and
include an airbag to cushion the impact if the drone crashes before using the
drones to monitor the forest on a large scale.
In conclusion, despite having some disadvantages, the
overall impact of deploying flying robots in the forest is positive if people
were to stay cautious by looking out for the possible problem and bringing the
risk to as low level as possible.
Cruz, H., Eckert, M., Meneses, J., & Martínez, J. F. (2016). Efficient Forest Fire Detection Index for Application in Unmanned Aerial Systems (UASs). Sensors, 16(6), 893. https://doi.org/10.3390/s16060893
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