Ecological restoration efforts are often taken in degraded lands with expensive and labor-intensive methods. The process is typically extremely slow. Our project aims to accelerate the process of ecological restoration and afforestation using robotics technologies. Like the industrial automation, the key is to standardize the process and reduce the device costs, by replacing a labor-intensive vegetation restoration process by a machine-intensive approach. We propose using plenty of robot to accelerate ecological restoration for large-scale degraded lands. These robots include digging robots, sapling robots and watering robots. We expect our planting robots will significantly accelerate the process of vegetation planting, achieving better, faster and more reliable ecological restoration. Our partners include Baidu Robotics and Autonomous Driving Lab, Huawei Atlas AI Computing Team.
Xinyu Zhang is a professor and the founding director of Robot Motion & Vision Laboratory in East China Normal University. He obtained his Ph.D. degree in 2004 from CAD&CG in Zhejiang University, China. From 2004 to 2012, he worked as a postdoc and research professor in the Center for Virtual Reality and Computer Graphics of Ewha Womans University, Korea. From 2012 to 2013, he was a research scientist in the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, U.S.A.