The team’s project has reached the finals of the global XPRIZE Rainforest competition which encourages the development of technology to measure and monitor the rainforest ecosystem.
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NewsTranscript
00:00 (gentle music)
00:02 - We're all coming together to meet this big challenge
00:23 that XPRIZE has put in front of us
00:25 to survey rainforest rapidly
00:27 and then communicate those insights to the broader community.
00:30 - So we brought here mainly two types of drones.
00:33 The first drone is DJI Matrice 300,
00:37 where we added a custom payload.
00:39 And with this custom payload,
00:40 we are able to collect air to sample airborne DNA.
00:45 And the second payload is a probe
00:49 that we can lower inside the canopy
00:51 in order to collect surface DNA
00:54 by swabbing the vegetation that we encounter
00:57 when the probe moves up and down into the canopy.
01:00 (gentle music)
01:04 So one of the main innovation
01:14 that we brought to the competition
01:15 is the probe that allow us to collect surface DNA.
01:20 So this probe is connected with a winch to a drone
01:24 and we can lower this probe deeply
01:26 inside the canopy.
01:28 And with custom control algorithms,
01:31 we can avoid the probe to get entangled.
01:33 So we can really safely lower the probe and bring it up.
01:36 And with this movement,
01:38 we swap environmental DNA from inside the canopy
01:40 that is not accessible otherwise by other means.
01:44 (gentle music)
01:46 you