Main findings for robotics in the environment

Australia has a unique biodiversity, a long, and world-leading, history of protecting and conserving native flora and fauna, and successful deployment of robotics for environmental monitoring and management. Vision-enabled robots can be deployed in long-duration fleets on land, in the air and in the water, to collect data to be used for exploration, mapping, understanding, stewardship and remediation. Many of the challenges for use of robots and computers in the environment relate to the sheer distances and persistence required for unsupervised operationalisation across the varied landscapes of the Australian continent. While the range of environmental challenges that can be tackled is wide, the type of technologies that need to be deployed can be applied to most sectors of the Australian economy. A more robotic/coding-literate community will contribute to environmental protection by enabling citizen science.