The European Union answer to Global Warming is the set of deeply transformative policies contained in the European Green Deal. Therein, a prominent role is given to monitoring, restoring, and preserving the ecosystems of the Natura 2000 Network. Undoubtedly, today this is one of the top priorities for humanity.
Today, monitoring of such a large area can be performed only by human operators. The reason is not only their expertise and knowledge in classifying plants and habitats, but also because their physical intelligence allows them to move for hours in wild unstructured environments, such dunes, forests, and mountains. However, humans not always guarantee repeatable, consistent, and affordable monitoring in order to assess the conservation status of ecosystems in order to timely act towards Nature preservation.
Instead, robotics can theoretically allow such monitoring, but, despite tremendous advancements in recent years, robots hardly leave laboratories and factories since they are not robust and efficient to survive in the real world. This main issue is due to the lack of autonomy of flying robots and also since ground robots are not: i) intelligent to autonomously percept, interpret, and interact with highly uneven, slipping and irregular grounds, ii) physically robust to manage unexpected contacts and impacts.
The Natural Intelligence (NI) project aims to serve the European Green Deal via monitoring the natural habitats of N2000N with robots able to effectively move in dunes, grasslands, forests, and alpine terrains. Natural Intelligence will enable artificial Cognition for a) autonomous classification of plants species and natural habitats, b) autonomous navigation in natural environments, and c) effective physical environment-robot interaction through environment-aware impedance planning and bio-inspired anticipatory control. Within NI, articulated soft-robotics powered mechatronics will a) enable enhanced locomotion and terrain perception using adaptive bio-inspired feet, b) improve robustness through novel robust-by-design articulated soft robot structures, and c) allow long-lasting operation capabilities through efficient exploitation of robot dynamics.
NI project will provide as main outputs:
• the first examples of robotic workforce for monitoring natural habitats (to TRL 4 and above) with system prototype demonstrations in real environments: forests, grasslands, dunes, and alpine scenarios;
• pre-standards and guidelines making the results of NI available at a decision-making level that will pave the way for the adoption of a robotic workforce for environmental monitoring putting Europe in a worldwide leading position;
To this end, the project envisions ambitious research and innovation activities focused on objectives related to: science and technology, usability, and standardization.
