Attending the WildDrone Summer School
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From the 22nd to the 26th of September I was not just a roboticist, I also felt like a biologist, an ecologist, a computer scientist, and especially a drone pilot. I didn’t attend courses at different universities; instead, I spent the week at the University of Konstanz for the WildDrone Summer School, organized by the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior.
This event was an intensive week of conferences and workshops (take a look at the incredible program), bringing together 26 leading researchers from different fields and 32 students eager to share their knowledge. The program included hands-on tutorials, an interactive poster session, and engaging discussions that spanned disciplines, from conservation biology to robotics and computer vision. I love to address engineering problems with a multidisciplinary approach, discussing with scientists to design technologies that truly meet their needs. This Summer School was exactly the kind of experience I had been looking for.
Conservation and Ecosystem Restoration is one of those fields where everyone has to contribute to make the difference. It was deeply inspiring to hear talks from people working in animal behavior, collective behavior, remote sensing, eDNA, rainforest monitoring, novel robotics design, animal tracking, landscape reconstruction, species identification, AI based conservation, Imagenomics, and even the social and political aspects of monitoring technologies.
I had many great conversations with the speakers and fellow students, and I’m very grateful for their answers to all of my questions and curiosities. I hope to meet them again in the future, when my robots have made their contribution to ocean ecosystem monitoring and restoration, and to tell them that their influence helped make it possible.
During the poster session, volunteers had the opportunity to present their ongoing and past research, an opportunity that I definitely took! (preview below, and official poster available here)
My Poster: Robots for Nature and Renewables
Obviously, I want to thank all the organizers who made this possible, as well as the researchers for their inspiring talks.
Be ready for WildBotics, the upcoming sequel project that will leverage the lessons learnt to develop new conservation robots, will walking be allowed this time?