A miniature wildlife tracking UAV payload system using acoustic biotelemetry

Studying the biological processes of wildlife and how they react and prevail with human population growth and development has become very important to sustain species and prevent extinction. Wildlife tracking has become a very important tool in this matter by giving researchers an idea of animal territory and habitat. However, the process of finding the animal after it has been tagged can be very tedious and costly. To make this tracking process more efficient, researchers at Utah State University (USU) are developing a low cost RF telemetry system for wildlife tracking using an autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) for triangulation and geo-location of the target. The use of small unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) for wildlife tracking offer many advantages such as cost reduction, human effort reduction and data acquisition efficiency due to the usage flexibility offered by the system in comparison to conventional methods. This paper presents the design of this tracking system, and shows some experimental data