discussion / Drones  / 3 November 2017

"harvesting" camera traps, bioacoustic sensors via drones

Groups

greetings -

I'm looking for someone to team up with to build the equivalent of the http://wadi.io remote data "harvesting" capability, whereby in-situ sensors can upload their holdings to an aerial vehicle. I can imagine embedding a yagi antenna along the underside of a long-range, fixed wing vehicle that would bank and "point" its antenna  towards the center of the circling maneuver where the sensor is for better S/N, canopy penetration, etc.

On the Ardupilot platform, I can imagine this would entail an onboard companion RPi that talked MAVLINK to PIXHAWK, that would get "woken up" (perhaps even a cold boot, to save power) when a geofence was crossed, that in turn would signal via XBee, (VHF, Lora, etc) to the in-situ sensor to turn on its uplink.  The autopilot would then go into loiter mode (MAV_CMD_NAV_LOITER_UNLIM) with a timeout.  The companion RPi would then perform the uplink, and issue back a MAV_CMD_OVERRIDE_GOTO back  to the PIXHAWK.

at least that's the theory

:-)

I sent a similar description and msg to the conservationdrones.org folks; no doubt a bit of crossover here.

I'm in the SF Bay area if any of you folks are generally nearby.

thanks!

Chris




Chris-

Sounds like an intertesting project. I'm interested in helping, but I'm on the east coast. Experienced EE/RF engineer, so the radio stuff is right up my alley.

Dave

Keen to follow this thread along and assist if I can - based in Australia. 

Don't forget that the 'assets' on ground, be it cameras, audio recorders etc also need to be capable of transmitting. Suspect that the aircraft side of things is the easy bit.  Suspect that commercial manufacturers will not support tampering with their hardware ..... although the clever ones might support it and see where it takes them.

The quadplanes seem to be a useful addition to the ardupilot vehicles.

 

and I wonder what happened to the Wadi drone project. It promised much.

MJ

 

 

NASA/NOAA did something like this with microbuoys for ocean temp sensing in the arctic - drone deploys (drops) micrbuoys and repeatedly returns to fly over fetching data over the following days and weeks

http://www.arcticobservingsummit.org/sites/arcticobservingsummit.org/files/Bradley_Microbuoys_AOS.pdf

Do you have a specific use case /location in mind?


If we could find research funding I'd be interested, I can fly &build UAS but this is also an interesting data management opportunity which I'm very interested in.

Perhaps you could mod the Ardupilot tracking antenna system if really needed but if you're flying in the vicinity with line of sight I bet you don't even need to aim the antenna 

I've seen a couple of papers on similar capabilities, both with airborne drones as well as underwater drones, so there've been folks working on it. @emjay has a good point that the sensor nodes need to support this, which could be a bit tricky depending on your tolerance for battery life. What types of sensors are you thinking about supporting?