“Plant Based Bio-Drone for Environmental Monitoring in The Amazon” presented by Cerpina

This paper explores merging technology and biology into semi-living designs in order to rethink and advance current ecological surveillance tools. Drone technology combined with (the sensory capabilities of) living plants could provide our monitoring tools with plant based intelligence and more advanced ways of sensing ecological changes. Drones are currently designed to collect specific data through single-flight missions without longer-term interaction with the target location or non-human species. The paper speculates on the potential use of recent discoveries of the ways plants sense and interact with their environments as well as each other as part of the monitoring process. The paper presents and discusses a future design proposal The BIO_DRONE—an autonomous hybrid drone designed by merging the plant Boquila trifoliolata with a flying device. The resulting concept is a hybrid biosensing drone that aims to provide manifold data about the world’s most complex biome—the Amazon rainforest.