“LocalDetect” is a project, where a sensor system for motion analysis and location of hunting birds is developed. The by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Energy (BMWi) funded project is being carried out by a consortium of different partners (TU Berlin, innotas, falconer Mr Walter and terrestris) and will run for 3 years, the official start was October 2016.
The main task of terrestris in the project is the development of algorithms for the real-time visualization of motion sequences and potential locations of these birds. The visualization is mainly focussed on mobile devices.
The advantages of the system are as follows:
- Location of birds independent of distances
- Support of the falconer with additional information such as time series of weather data (temperature, precipitation, wind directions and speeds) and forecasts
- Information on the health and training status of the animals
- Information about the habits of birds
A meeting of the project team took place on the island of Rügen on 24 July. The shape of the sensor was discussed with the falconer using a prototype. The project team discussed the design of the web interface and the functionality of the application on site.
The functioning of the sensor and the interaction with the web application on a tablet were tested with a drone instead of a bird. For this a device (a 10 gram weighting sensor) was attached to a drone. The positioning data of the device is transmitted via the Sigfox network, so that the exact location of the drone could be drawn on a map. A chip located in the sensor records the data, further attrributes such as relative altitude, speed and mode are planned. After the meeting, the project partners further optimized their applications and sensors on the basis of the knowledge gained.
After the meeting on Rügen the implemented results were again practically tested during a 2nd drone test, performed on 19th of September in Bonn. Now, after all field tests have been carried out, the implementation will be finalized in the following weeks. A final test with a real hunting bird is planned in November. We are looking forward on this first real test.
With the project, a practical application in a classical IoT (Internet of Things) environment will be setup. From this technical base, we expect to realize other projects with different questions in the near future.
