Observing Whales Using Small Aerial Robots

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Observing Southern Right Whales
Peninsula Valdez, Argentina
August 20-25 2009
Daniel Gurdan, Ascending Technologies
Roger Payne, Ocean Alliance
Daniel Rus, Distributed Robotics Laboratory
Mariano Sironi, Conservacion de Ballenas
Jan Stumpf, Ascending Technologies
Observing whales is important for many marine biology tasks including taking census, determining family lineage, and general behavior observations. Currently, whales are observed manually using binoculars and cameras from the shore or from boats, and notes are made using pencil and paper. The process is error prone, non-quantitative and very labor intensive. Human-operated planes and helicopters are also used, but the data gathered this way is limited. Planes fly at high altitude, can not hover, and the data is limited in duration and precision.Helicopters can hover and fly closer to the sea surface, but they are noisy and effect the behavior of the whales.
We used a small hovering unmanned aerial vehicles known as the Ascending Technologies Falcon 8 robot to assist in the data collection of whales. The robot is silent enough to fly close above the water's surface and not disturb the whales. We had several successful missions of approximately fifteen minutes each, during which the robot was piloted over groups of whales and video was recorded.
Motivated by this data, our goal is to create an autonomous flying robot that relies on vision-based position estimates and only on-board processing to navigate. The robot is light weight and computationally impoverished such as an Ascending Technologies Hummingbird or Pelican platform. Our goal robot system differs from existing systems that use additional sensors such as GPS or laser scanners or perform off-board processing of the video stream. We describe an autonomous aerial robot system that uses a suite of fast computer vision algorithms to identify and track targets in natural environments. The algorithms are designed for targets that moves against a fairly uniform background such as a whale moving on the surface of the sea or an animal moving on a meadow.