Hello to all. This is my first post and I am hoping to raise some awareness of how UAV's can help in the fight against poaching. There is an organisation called the International Anti Poaching Foundation (IAPF) which is dedicated to stopping the slaughter of endangered species in Africa. Some of the videos on the website made me sick, to think poachers kill these magnificent animals just for their tusks and horns that are used in useless Chinese remedies is nothing short of a disgrace and travesty on the human race.
These guys are just starting to use drones to track poachers and they need our help. They currently have 2 in the air and are in the process of preparing another 5. This is their own UAV program and is fully funded by donations. If you are truly interested in taking your drone skills to the ultimate level then please do what you can to help. Make no mistake about it, this is a war they are fighting. Hunting and capturing poachers and protecting wildlife is a full time job. The organisation is run by an ex SAS (Special Forces) soldier from the Australian Army. Some of the accounts from engagements with poachers are terrifying and usually end in shoot outs no different to a warfare situation. Rangers have been killed trying to protect these animals. The 2 drones they do have have saved their lives many times.
As an ex Royal Australian Air Force missile engineer I am just starting to help them out and I will do whatever I can. But as a newbie to the drone community I am here to get information and toss some ideas around, raise awareness and also see what equipment people are willing to donate or to help out in whatever way they can. There are 39000 members of this community, if 1 in 1000 can help out even in the smallest way you can contribute, the difference you will make will be greatly appreciated.
Flying a drone around the neighbourhood is fun but to lend our skills to this, to me is the ultimate use of this technology and my years of training in guided missile electronics and control systems. Please contribute anyway you can.
So its over to you guys and lets see what we can do.
Comments please
Best Regards
Michael
Comments
It is nice to see members rising to the occasion here!!!!
Regards,
TCIII
Very interesting. I'm a university master student (PhD next year). I have quite some professional and hobby experience designing analog and digital communication systems.
I am actually wondering how you handle the communication with the drone? Traditional control and video links as typically used on this site are very easy to detect (and jam) with hardware that can be bought on eBay for less than 100$. Seeing the value of the poached wares (and the value of staying out of jail), I suspect that this may become a problem in the future if the drone approach is successful.
Do the poachers use radio equipment, such as walkie talkies? Locating the signal from the air is relatively simple. Multipath propagation is a non issue since line of sight is guaranteed. A single transmission lasting less than a second already yields a relatively good position estimate if it is nearby, and certainly yields a useful bearing to get closer.
I feel computer vision should make it possible to automatically monitor the camera images (I imagine sitting behind a monitor for hours looking at very boring video is no fun). Especially if you have a FLIR sensor since living things will light up, making simple blob detection sufficient. I am sure if you upload some example pictures made by the drone many experts on this site will be able to point you in the right direction.
be interested in helping, I have a uav x8, and I am electronic engineer in air forcemy e mail is rodrigo.cancinoc @ gmail.com
Michael, there is no general restriction here on posting links. So here is the link to the International Anti Poaching Foundation (IAPF) page about their drone program: http://www.iapf.org/en/campaigns/iapfdrone . There have been numerous casual references here to the use of drones for wildlife management but having this specific information is great. I expect that you'll get both technical help and donations here, not only because of the important work itself but also because it is in the self-interest of this community to highlight a use of UAVs that is so dramatic and at the same time is something that is very difficult for the "anti-drone" crowd to criticize.
I'm putting my money where my mouth is and making a donation via the IAPF Web site. I'm going to leave a comment there that the donation comes from a member here, I hope a lot of others who are here will do the same.
Maybe you could put a link to here up on your drone program page. Also, the structure here is such that posts flow by and sort of vanish into a bottomless pit. Posting updates as a new blog can help keep awareness up...
You guys may want to check out what Wayne Garris over at http://hobbyuav.com/tag/techpod/ is doing, right now they have 2-3 hour flight times, and there was mention of a composite model coming. Would make these about $2000 loaded with 3 hour flight times.
There have been videos posted here of FLIR setups, if you could mount a FLIR and use OpenCV you can auto identify heat signatures to be classified by a ground crew and provide alerts to rangers on the ground when it appears objects have a trajectory towards a specified GPS location.
I would be willing to provide programming support for a project of this sort.
I need to contact you by e-mail, please accept the friendship
-
1
-
2
-
3
of 3 Next