Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle System for Wildlife Radio Collar Tracking

摘要: This paper describes a low cost system for tracking wildlife that is equipped with radio collars. Currently, researchers have to physically go into the field directional antenna try pinpoint VHF (very high frequency) signal originating from collar. Depending on terrain, it could take an entire day locate single animal. To vastly improve upon this traditional approach, proposed here utilizes small fixed-wing aircraft drone simple on-board, flying automated mission. Received strength recorded, and used create heat map shows collar's position. A prototype of was built using off-the-shelf hardware custom processing algorithms. Initial tests confirm systems capabilities its promise tracking.