New Developments and Environmental Applications of Drones

Dr Tomi Westerlund is a professor in robotics and autonomous systems. He is the research group leader of the Turku Intelligent Embedded and Robotics Systems (TIERS) lab at the University of Turku, Finland. TIERS's main research interests are in multi-robot systems, autonomous robots and edge computing. The main application areas for TIERS include collaborative and heterogeneous multi-robot systems, blockchain technology for distributed robotic systems, localization and mapping of urban and unstructured environments, hardware accelerators for ROS and embedded and distributed intelligence. In essence, to better understand how robots operate and can perform a variety of functions in different fields like environmental monitoring, delivery, agriculture, and search and rescue missions. Prof. Westerlund is a senior member of IEEE.

Jorge Peña Queralta received the B.Sc. degree in mathematics and physics engineering from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, BarcelonaTech, Barcelona, Spain, in 2016, the M.Sc. (Tech.) degree in ICT from the University of Turku, Turku, Finland, in 2018, the M.Eng. degree in electronics and communication engineering from Fudan University, Shanghai, China, in 2018, and the Ph.D. (Tech.) degree from the University of Turku in 2022. He is a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Turku Intelligent Embedded and Robotic Systems Group, University of Turku. His research interests include multi-robot systems, collaborative autonomy, distributed perception, and robot learning.

Chapter 1: Wild Swarms: Autonomous Drones for Environmental Monitoring and Protection.- Chapter 2: Connecting different drone operations with the farm robotics management.- Chapter 3: Is Alice Really in Wonderland? UWB-Based Proof of Location for UAVs with Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain.- Chapter 4: Accuracy assessment of UAS photogrammetry with GCP and PPK-assisted georeferencing.- Chapter 5: Simulation Analysis of Exploration Strategies and UAV Planning for Search and Rescue.- Chapter 6: Evaluating the Performance of Multi-Scan Integration for UAV LiDAR-based Tracking.- Chapter 7: Applications and challenges related to the use of Unmanned Aircraft Systems in environment monitoring.- Chapter 8: Drone-borne measurements of solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) at a boreal site.- Chapter 9: Thermal Drone Images as a Predictor of Soil Moisture Values.