An article by The Ohio State University shares:
A new autonomous drone system could provide ecologists with deeper insights into animal behavior in the wild, a study suggests.
Drones, or unmanned aerial systems (UAS), are often used to collect massive amounts of high-quality aerial footage of unique places.
While most of these state-of-the-art technologies rely on human pilots to operate them, researchers have developed WildWing, a complete hardware and software open-source UAS for independently collecting dense animal behavioral data.
This single-drone system, which has so far collected about 37,000 images of various endangered animals, was created to help scientists automate and standardize data for better behavioral analysis, said Jenna Kline, lead author of the study and a graduate student in computer science and engineering at The Ohio State University.
“Animals and their habitats are changing rapidly, so if we want insights about them in real time, remote sensing technologies like drones and AI can play a big part in that,” she said.
Studying how animals behave in the wild can be challenging, in part due to how disruptive human noise may be to the creatures living in the region. Yet a drone’s ability to gather data much more quietly across challenging terrains and complete complex tracking and positioning tasks makes them powerful tools for studying the natural world, said Kline.
“By automating a mission, the data you collect is more reliable and consistent, which is really important if you want to build a data set to train a computer vision model,” she said.
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Be sure to visit the BWU Technology Partnerships Initiative website to learn more about how our NEOFIX program drives economic growth, promotes policy and infrastructure to improve drone safety and efficiency in various industries, and ensures that drone technology is being used responsibly.