About WildBotics¶

Autonomous Sampling with Robotics in the Wild for Nature Conservation

Earth is losing biodiversity faster than ever, and conservation needs practices that are effective and affordable. Much of today's conservation work, from collecting samples to inspecting and monitoring wildlife and habitats, is labour-intensive, costly and slow, and the data it produces can be incomplete or biased. Advances in robotics and artificial intelligence now offer conservationists practical new tools.

WildBotics brings robotics, sensing and AI together with conservation ecology. Autonomous aerial, ground and aquatic robots are the common platform for new long-endurance systems, better sensors and software, and automated ways of monitoring wildlife and ecosystems and of collecting and interpreting samples at scale.

A doctoral network¶

WildBotics trains a new generation of researchers who can work across engineering, computer science and ecology. Its doctoral candidates are hosted by universities, research institutes and companies across Europe, and work alongside conservation organisations in Europe, Africa and the Arctic. Their training programme combines research, scientific and technical, and transferable skills with fieldwork, hackathons and a summer school.

Visit WildBotics.eu

Building on WildDrone¶

WildBotics builds on the groundwork laid by WildDrone, the MSCA Doctoral Network on autonomous drones for nature conservation, and on the lessons learned there. WildDrone's research, training and fieldwork with conservation partners shaped how WildBotics is designed, and the two networks (via WildDrone's ongoing post-funding community) continue to meet and work together. WildDrone's papers, deliverables and other results are on its outputs page.

Visit WildDrone.eu WildDrone outputs

Funding¶

WildBotics is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Doctoral Network under Horizon Europe, grant agreement No 101227034.

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Executive Agency (REA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.