poster_wilddrone_summer_school_Edouard_Rolland.pdf

The WildDrone Summer School took place in September 2025, hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany. WildDrone researches and develops the use of drones for wildlife conservation, and is an MSCA Doctoral Network funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation funding programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 101071224.Despite rapid advances in drone technology and multirobot coordination algorithms, few systems have been validated in real-world wildlife monitoring scenarios. This poster presents a framework for autonomous collection of high-quality, multi-perspective data on gregarious animals in their natural habitat. Our approach is based on a particle swarm optimisation algorithm that computes the positions of drones according to the locations and orientations of the animals, ensuring effective non-intrusive observation for biological data collection. The system was deployed during a field campaign at Ol Pejeta Conservancy, Kenya, with 12 missions using three commercial off-the-shelf drone platforms.