Discussions

I'm a total noob who had an idea after hearing about a guy's problem. I would like to hear opinions about the technology hurdles to a project I'm considering.

Here's the problem in a nutshell. Deer hunters sometimes fatally wound a deer but lose the blood trail when trying to find it. It is particularly hard to track a wounded deer at night or after the blood has had time to dry. Sometimes the deer just stops bleeding due to fat plugging the holes from the arrow or bullet. Tracking dogs are becoming more popular, but dogs require rear-round maintenance and might simply start eating the deer when they find it.

Fatally hit deer can sometimes travel miles, but if not pursued, they will often bed down and die in a matter of hours within 800 yds. of where they were shot. One of the techigues of finding a deer with a dried up blood trail is a grid search, but deer are visually hard to detect in heavy cover. An unrecovered deer ends up feeding coyotes and other scavengers.

I remembered watching episodes of the TV show 'Cops' long ago where they used a helicopter equipped with a FLIR camera at night to chase escaping suspects. Sometimes they would see deer and elk, even in fairly thick wooded land. So here's the obvious idea: A UAV equipped with a down looking infrared thermal imaging camera and flying a programmed grid search pattern over a specific area (up to 1/2 X 1/2 mi.) where the deer is suspected of being. It would be either transmitting the image or recording its travels on board for review upon return. The image would have current GPS coordinates displayed in order to get the hunter to the vicinity of any hot spots sighted.

Ideally the grid search would be conducted in both the E-W and N-S directions to maximize the potential for spotting the deer. Two cameras, one facing somewhat forward and the other facing somewhat aft, would also maximize the potential, but this could be accomplished with just a forward looking camera making a second flight in the opposite direction.

Time is off the essence, because once the deer dies, it cools and the meat starts to spoil. There is probably an 8 hour window for recovery after the deer dies. So the specs for this UAV would be:

1.) Autonomous night flight over a 160 acre area (could be multiple flights) in a grid search pattern based on GPS.

2.) Record and/or transmit the video image from an infrared camera capable of seeing deer-sized animals against a cold background with some degree of interference from trees and brush.

3.) Encoding of GPS coordinates into the infrared video signal.

I am a former Cessna pilot, but I haven't flown an RC plane yet. I'm not sure if I could finance this project, but if the technology for autopiloting on this scale is here already, I could talk to some people. Obviously this 'warm body search and recovery' technology could also be useful for human SAR.

So, the key technologies are:

a.) Night flight.

b.) Grid flight based on GPS

c.) IR thermal imaging video with encoded GPS coordinates

Any assessment of the current level of DIY drone technology for this purpose would be welcome. I realize this might be a bit like asking for the holy grail of hobby level drone development, but if anybody has any experience with any of the key technologies, I would love to hear about it.