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About

Ankit Prabhu is pioneering the use of autonomous aerial robots to revolutionize forestry and agriculture. His research centers on metric-semantic mapping, multi-robot coordination, and active perception, aiming to replace labor-intensive manual data collection with intelligent robotic systems. Prabhu’s major contributions include developing algorithms that enable UAVs to autonomously map forests, estimate tree diameters, and identify semantically meaningful objects like individual trees. His work on active metric-semantic mapping allows multiple aerial robots to collaboratively build rich, object-based maps, while his SlideSLAM framework achieves real-time, decentralized SLAM for heterogeneous robot teams. With his most-cited paper, “UAVs for forestry,” already garnering 24 citations since 2024, and the widely-used TreeScope dataset (18 citations), Prabhu’s impact is rapidly growing. He has also tackled robust collaborative localization, enabling UAVs to localize using unlabeled ground vehicles. By bridging robotics and environmental science, Prabhu is accelerating agricultural research and demonstrating that autonomous systems can provide actionable, scalable solutions for real-world challenges in forestry and precision agriculture.