Robotic monitoring of grasslands: a dataset from the EU Natura2000 habitat 6210* in the central Apennines (Italy)

Abstract

Despite the remarkable growth of the global market for robotics, robotic monitoring of habitats is still an understudied topic. This is true, among others, for the species-rich EU Annex I habitat "6210 - Semi-natural grasslands and scrubland facies on calcareous substrates". This habitat is typically surveyed by human operators. In this work, we present a dataset concerning relevés performed through the quadrupedal robot ANYmal C. The dataset contains information from three plots, which include the robot state, videos, and images acquired to assess the habitat conservation status. Additionally, a collection of videos and pictures about two typical and one early warning species of habitat 6210 is also presented. This database is publicly available in the provided Zenodo repository and will aid researchers in several fields. Robot state information can be used by engineers to validate their algorithms, while data gathered by the robot can be used to design new methodologies and new metrics to assess the habitat conservation status or train/test classifiers (e.g. neural networks) for plant classification.