Droning_2_orangutan_search

Crowdsourcing appeal: We know there are several orangutan nests in this forest grid (nests are found in the canopy). If you spot any, please do leave us a comment with the video time and rough description of nest location. Thanks!

Autopilot drone flying a grid over a forest in search of orangutan nests.

Background: Autopilot drone developed by a team of ecologists and software developers for forest monitoring, real-time land use mapping, and biodiversity conservation. This is part of a series of field tests in a remote forest area in Sumatra, Indonesia. The plane is fully autopilot, except when landing (due to a small landing area).

Autopilot system is based on ArdupilotMega developed by an open-source community at http://diydrones.com.
The plane is a low cost Hobbyking Bixler RC model.
Camera system is a GoPro Hero HD (version 1).

#1: Logging transect, http://youtu.be/IOm9v0Ewcek
#2: Orangutan search, http://youtu.be/hXTbJA-304k
#3: River mission, http://youtu.be/4icq_takJLw

Contact: lian.koh@env.ethz.ch (Lian Pin Koh) or sergewich1@yahoo.com (Serge Wich)

Research homepage: www.lianpinkoh.com

• Category

  Science & Technology

[Lian Pin Koh]

@chrjae1: Thanks for the suggestion! Team Blacksheep lives about 10 mins from where I do! They use a completely different system (delta wing craft,long-range FPV rather than autopilot). But will explore the video processing suggestion!

[Lian Pin Koh]

@TheMrBlinx: Good idea, but the main concern is availability of helium (or other light gases). Also blimps/zeplins might make for a bigger practice target for people on the ground who have something to hide!

[chrjae1]

It might be possible to stabilize the video by post-processing in software (I don't have experience with that). I don't think it's so bad, though.

Maybe contact "Team Blacksheep" (Swiss/Austria guys), they've got an interest and experience building planes that fly quiescently (even though in general that probably means bigger planes, thus better shooting targets), and they seem to be getting help from people good in video processing.