Remote Imaging of Community Ecology via Animal-borne Wireless Networks

Abstract:

This project is conceiving and constructing a wireless network of embedded devices, for monitoring the behavior of animals in the wild, that will be deployed and tested in a biologically--relevant application. This project will be the first to deploy animal-- borne wirelessly networked devices that are capable of providing not only geo-- location data, but also to execute cooperative strategies that save battery--life by selectively recording bandwidth--intensive audio and high--definition video footage of occurrences of animal group behavior of interest, such as predation. In addition to enabling autonomous video capture, the proposed wireless network will register the relative positions of the animals and other sensory information that will be useful in sociobiological characterizations. This project is addressing three primary technical challenges:

• Investigating methods to design and analyze the performance of distributed algorithms that implement autonomous decisions (for video capture) at the mobile agents, subject to communication and computational constraints.
• We are pursuing data--driven fundamental research on the modeling of animal group motion for multiple sociobiological configurations that will promote a formal understanding of the mechanisms of social interaction.
• This project has a significant component of applied research on methods for hardware integration for building distributed networks of embedded devices that are capable of executing our newly developed algorithms, subject to power and weight constraints.

We have obtained preliminary results in all the three areas mentioned above, and we have already conducted tests to validate the theory and certify the performance of the algorithms and hardware developed. We have participated in outreach activities and hosted various undergraduate research projects. The team is preparing for the first deployment in late October or early November of 2013, in collaboration with the Smithsonian Conservation Center at Front Royal. More details about the technical progress, publications and other activities can be found in the poster and video.