Long-term and large-scale tracking is important for a broad range of applications from livestock tracking for agricultural productivity to wildlife tracking for ecological preservation and management of disease risks. Wireless sensor network technology has enabled novel application scenarios in the field of animal monitoring, as it allows to track location and activity of animals at a high spatio-temporal resolution. While radio-frequency tags for animal location tracking have been used by domain scientists for decades, downloading data from the tags is either labour intensive or expensive if satellite technology is used. The process of downloading data from animals can be automated by deploying a fixed network of wireless receiver stations, so called base nodes or gateways, that download and forward data from nearby animals to a central server. However, many animals exhibit nomadic behaviour and can roam vast areas where sparse distribution of gateway nodes results in rare opportunities for wireless communication. The animal tag technology, therefore, needs to use local data buffering and delay-tolerant network algorithms to be able to collect meaningful datasets.

Camazotz: long-term Tracking of Small Objects

Camazotz  is a low power autonomous device that promises to revolutionise long-term tracking of mobile assets, from wildlife such as flying foxes to livestock and even public bicycle fleets.

It uses a low power system-on-a-chip with processing and short-range radio communication, multimodal sensors including a GPS module, inertial unit, temperature, pressure, audio and solar panels for long-term energy replenishment.

Camazotz’s ability to operate sustainably without any human involvement or continuous connection make it suitable for most outdoor tracking applications. The technology’s benefits include:  

  • Autonomy: As a fully autonomous tracking device, Camazotz can track mobile assets almost indefinitely with no human intervention. This feature is particularly useful for wildlife tracking where there is virtually no physical access to devices once deployed.
  • Configurability: This technology supports full reconfiguration through remote wireless commands. A key feature that can be remotely configured is contact logging, where Camazotz tracking devices can be set to exchange information with other Camazotz devices. This enables data exchange from remote devices that may not return to a base node for a long time. 
  • Sustainability: Camazotz provides near-indefinite tracking for small highly mobile assets. It operates on a tiny 300mAh battery, but thanks to its dual solar panels, it can harvest energy from the sun to replenish its supplies.

 

Case Study: Continental-Scale Tracking of Flying Foxes

Flying foxes present health, economic and conservation challenge in Australia. On the one hand, flying foxes spread the Hendra virus and cause crop damage of around $20 million a year.   While the Hendra virus has caused significant public concern in Australia,  similar diseases that spread through flying foxes,  including Ebola, cause hundreds of deaths each year in countries like the Asia and Africa, occasionaly wiping out village or lifestock. This is particularly a  problem in industrial farming where a large number of animals are grouped together within close physical proximity. On the other hand, conservation ecologists believe that flying fox populations are in decline, and that certain species may be reaching critically low numbers.   One of the key barriers to an increased understanding of these  animals is the highly dynamic distribution of their populations and the large-scale traveling distances.  For instance, a single animal might travel up to 90 km per night from one  roosting camp to another.   An  individual animal may use up to 3 roosting camp per month,  and occasionally, traveling across national borders as far as  Malaysia or Sumatra.   There are currently no existing technologies for tracking the size of populations, the movement of individual animals, and interactions among animals that spread disease. Satellite transmitters have been tested in a very limited scale for tracking flying Fox positions, but these devices have very low position accuracy and a very limited operational lifetime.  Manual techniques for population  census  are very labor-intensive and accurate as well,  particularly because not all camps are known.   The inadequacy of current tracking methods leads to the design of and investment in agricultural protection programs and conservation that may not be appropriate. This project will address this gap by applying adaptive  duty cycling techniques and by combining multiple sensor inputs for accurate and energy-efficient position tracking of flying foxes.

The main goal of the project is to provide tracking for at least 6 months with at most 100m uncertainty, and working on more advanced algorithms for progressively reducing the tracking uncertainty.

(Overview presentation ppt slides from MLSDA'14 Keynote)

 

 

Camazotz on a flying fox in Cairns bat hospitalNetwork of base stations across AustraliaIbis tracking with Camazotz in Sydney Botanical Gardens


Project Partners

This SSN-TCP project has partner projects that are part of the National Flying Fox Monitoring Program, and that are currently in the Biodiversity Portfolio (BRABA) and the Biosecurity Flagship.

The funding for these projects includes internal CSIRO contributions and external partners

Science and Impact Higlights

 

 

 

Videos

Introducing Camazotz: A Platform for Sustainable Tracking

Large Scale Tracking: The Internet of Nomadic Things

Camazotz wins the QLD State Merit iAward 2014

Sample Trajectory of Flying Fox tracked with Camazotz over Adelaide

Camazotz Overview