“LocalDetect” refers to the development of a sensor system for movement analysis and localization of birds of prey. The cooperative project, funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi), started on 01.10.2016 and will run until 28.02.2019.

The development of algorithms for the real-time visualization of movement patterns and locations on mobile devices is terrestris’ main task in this cooperative project.

The advantages of the system are as follows:

• Kilometer-independent location of the birds
• Support of the falconer with additional information such as time series of weather data (temperature, precipitation, wind directions and speeds) including forecasts
• Information about the health and training condition of the animals
• Information about the habits of the birds

On July 24, a meeting of the project team (TU Berlin, innotas, falconer Mr. Walter and terrestris) took place on the island of Rügen. The shape of the sensor was discussed with the falconer using a prototype. The project team exchanged ideas on site about the design of the web interface and the functionality of the application.

With a drone test, the functions of the sensor and the interaction with the web application were tested on a tablet. For this purpose, a device (10 gram lighter sensor) is attached to the drone. To make it visible where exactly the drone is located, positioning data is transmitted via the Sigfox network. A chip located in the sensor records the data. The project participants hope to gain further information from this data, for example about the relative altitude, the speed and the mode.

Furthermore, the use of the sensors on the birds of prey was tested. After the appointment, the project partners further optimized their applications and sensors based on the findings.

In another drone test on September 19, the implemented results were again tested in practice in the Bonner Rheinaue.

With the test being carried out, all project participants are on the home straight of their implementations and the tasks in the next few weeks are the fine-tuning of the application. A final test with a bird of prey is planned for November.

The project is building a practical application in a classic IoT (Internet of Things) environment. From this technical basis, we expect that we will realize further projects with other questions in the near future.