Wednesday, 14 May 2003

GPS Based Animal Tracking Collar

This was the final year project of my undergraduate course. The objective of the project is to design a system to monitor the ranging patterns of an animal in the wild. Design comprised of two parts. The collar which is attached to the animals’ neck and the base station where the positional data will be logged and displayed. The micro-controller controlled collar is programmed in such a way that it will activate according to a pre programmed schedule and calculate the position of the animal using the embedded GPS receiver and store it. After taking 10 valid fixes it will upload those fixes using the RF link operates at 433.9MHz. The collar is powered using two D type Li-iron cells. In the base station receiver will save the incoming data and also display on an online map. The range of the system is about 2km. The system is being upgraded to get a range of about 4~5 km. The batteries are enough to operate the collar for about 500 days.

The project was in collaboration with the National Zoological Gardens. The Zoo will use this system to monitor the ranging patterns of a pair of leopard that they are going to release to the wild for the first time.

Crop Raiding Elephant Detection System Using Infrasonic Calls

This two phased project addresses one of the major conservation issue in Sri Lanka, The Human – Elephant Conflict. Recent research has shown that elephants are using infrasound calls to communicate among themselves. The objective of the project is to implement an electronic system to detect the crop raiding elephants using the elephant infrasonic calls and give early warnings to the farmers. The project is funded by the US Fish & wildlife Service.

Phase I

The already completed first phase designed a system to detect and record infrasound calls. Algorithms have been developed to analyze the infrasound calls. The data acquisition system can scan four infrasound sensors and log the acoustic data on a laptop computer. The custom software developed, can analyze the four channels in real-time and display them in form of spectrograms and time – amplitude plots. The data collected in the first phase will be used to develop the algorithms in the first phase.

Phase 2

The objective of the second phase is to implement a system to automatically detect the elephant infrasound calls and trigger an alarm. The system should identify the calls from the noisy environment and also should avoid false alarms. The elephant calls which lasts for about 2~3 seconds in average, poses eyebrow shaped frequency patterns. The algorithms that are being tried are dynamic time warping and spectrogram correlation.

Lighting Up Rural Households Using White LEDs & Renewable Energies.

This project is in collaboration with the Light Up The World Foundation of University of Calgary, Canada. About 40% of the Sri Lanka’s households are yet to be electrified. Some of these will not get grid power in foreseen future. The purpose of the project is to illuminate the houses using White LEDs powered by renewable energies. So far we have lit up three villages in Sri Lanka. The Village Pokunutenna is in the Nothern Border of the Udawalawa National Park and the villages Rambukoluwa & Dammantenna are in the Knuckles Forest reserve.

Each house is given two 1W WLED lamps and a 12V, 7Ah rechargeable battery. Usually two solar powered charging stations are installed in the strategic points. Each battery has to get recharged every other day.  

Robots for the Robocon 2002 – Asia Pacific robot Competition (Japan 2002)

I was a member of a group of six to make robots to represent Sri Lanka in the RoboCon 2002 competition. The robots were to put beach balls in to an array of cylinders. Marks will be given to the topmost balls in cylinders and has to beat the opponent in a game of 3 minuets. Two robots were designed. One was manually controlled and the other one was a fully automated one. The automated one was capable of track its path, avoid any obstacles and to put beach balls in to the cylinders.  Laptop computer was used as the controller. Optical tracking was used to path tracking and all the mechanics were made by the team.

Identification Guide for Sri Lankan Forest Birds

This is a joint project with a graduate student in the Department of Zoology, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. Our aim is to compile a guide book for Sri Lankan forest birds. This guide will give the description and a painting of a bird as in case of a conventional guide book. In addition to that it will also play the call of the bird as the call is a very unique way of identifying a bird even without seeing it. We are in a process of recording calls. 

Wildlife conservation Related Electronics

I ve been a member of a team of volunteers to help the local wildlife authorities for radio tracking of elephants, problems with electric fences etc. We ve designed antennas and RF pre amplifiers for use with the radio tracking receivers. We also repaired some old radio collars so that they can be reused and hence save lot of money. The collars repaired by our team were used to monitor the juvenile elephants that were released for the wild from the elephnat transit home of the Department of Wildlife Conservation.

I ve also been a member of a team for evaluate the performance of the electric fences of the wild life protected areas in North-Central province of Sri Lanka.

Click here to see the photos of these projects