About Reforestr
Reforestr is an autonomous drone that plants seeds. It was developed at HackGT in September of 2015. When the drone is told to, it replants an area then returns home.
Reforestr is an autonomous drone that plants seeds. It was developed at HackGT in September of 2015. When the drone is told to, it replants an area then returns home.
Forest fires are natural occurences in forests, but after some large burns, the area can take a long time to recover. In order to keep our environment healthy, we need to help the recovery process along by replanting native species.
Reforestation is the act of planting in existing forests that have been depleted. There are many reasons that an area may need reforestation, including wildfires and logging. Reforestation can help the area recover, increasing local air quality and rebuilding natural habitats.
Current methods of replanting damaged forests include dispersing seeds from helicopters and replanting trees by hand. When dispersing seeds from a helicopter, many more seeds need to be distributed than will be successfully grown. This is because many seeds are damaged by the long fall to the ground, or land in areas where they will be unable to germinate. This causes significant waste in seeds. When planting by hand, sapplings are generally used. Sapplings are extremely expensive to purchase and labor-intensive to plant, making this an inneficient solution for larger areas.
Deforestation may have a huge environmental cost, but reforatation can have a large cost as well. Reforestation can vastly improve an area, but it can be an economic burden. In cases where large amounts of land have burned, as they did in Oregon, Washington, and California in 2015, aiding in the recovery of all the burned land poses a finantial challenge for the Forest Services.
The Reforestr Drone provides the environmental benefits of reforestation while reducing the cost and waste associated with it. When it is deployed, the drone navigates itself to the coordinates it is given. Once there, it approaches the ground and begins flying forward, living a tilled path into which it deposits seeds. Throughout this process the drone balances itself and avoids obstacles. Reforestr requires no manual operation -- it is fully autonomous. Once the area has been replanted or the battery is in need of charge the drone returns home to its base.
