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Robots in the wild: Decision-making AI for environmental monitoring

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  • Date
    26 January 2026
    Timeframe
    16:00 - 17:00 CET Geneva
    Duration
    60 minutes
    • Days
      Hours
      Min
      Sec

    Autonomous robots could transform environmental monitoring by collecting long-term, large-scale data at spatial and temporal resolutions that manual methods can’t match, whilst also offering lower carbon cost and greater adaptability. Yet routine deployment “in the wild” remains rare. Real-world monitoring demands robust hardware and, crucially, AI control that can make reliable tactical and strategic decisions under uncertainty despite dynamic conditions, limited sensing, and mission risk.

    This talk presents an approach to decision-making under uncertainty for autonomous environmental monitoring missions. The robot-environment system is modelled as a Markov decision process (MDP), enabling principled planning and adaptation when outcomes are stochastic and information is incomplete. The talk shows how this framework supports reliable autonomy across diverse domains and platforms: dive planning for ocean gliders, demonstrated in over 1500 km of autonomous sampling in the North Atlantic; autonomous navigation strategies for biodiversity estimation in grassland ecosystems; and autonomous exploration and mapping for complex nuclear decommissioning environments.

     

    Session Objectives:

    By the end of the session, participants will be able to:

    • Describe why long-term, large-scale environmental monitoring benefits from autonomous robotics.
    • Explain how decision-making under uncertainty can be formulated as a Markov decision process (MDP) for robot monitoring missions.
    • Apply core MDP concepts (state, actions, transition uncertainty, rewards) to reason about planning choices in a real monitoring scenario.

    Recommended Mastery Level / Prerequisites:

    The speaker will assume a basic comfort with discrete mathematical notation, probabilities, and optimisation, but the core concepts of the webinar should be accessible to anyone.

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