IELTS Research Reports

Anthony Green and Roger HawkeyExperienced Group: JaneTextWildlife-spotting robotsConservationists are using robotic cameras to help search for rare wildlife. Biology fieldwork isvery labour intensive, so there is increasing use of technology to collect data in an unobtrusive way.Autonomous sound recording units and video imaging equipment can be programmed to collect dataat scheduled times in remote areas, and it is often possible, via long-range wireless communications, toaccess the data from a distant location. However, the chances of recording an occurrence of the targetspecies are very low, so it is important that the equipment should be selective in what it records, orhave the ability to sift the data and pick out likely candidates for expert examination.Some wildlife cameras are controlled by passive infrared motion sensors which detect a nearbyanimal, point the camera towards it and trigger an image-capture sequence. Some are directlycontrolled by remote observers, in a similar way to web cameras or surveillance systems. A project,led by University of California, Berkeley and Texas A & M aims to integrate signals from both sensorsand humans in the control of a hybrid teleoperated/ autonomous robotic device called the collaborativeobservatory for natural environments (CONE). The developers are building an “observatory” that willenable scientists to study animals in their natural habitat via the Internet. A purely automatic versionof this, the ACONE, is aiding researchers at Cornell University in their systematic search for the NorthAmerican ivory-billed woodpecker.The ivory-billed woodpecker is a large, vividly coloured bird that was widely thought to be extinct.There has been no officially confirmed sighting of it since 1940, but a spate of recently reportedglimpses inspired a determined search effort by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service andCornell Lab of Ornithology (CLO). The project started in 2005 with over 20 trained field biologiststaking part in the search team, and volunteers also being recruited. They had to become familiar withthe use of GPS, digital video cameras and microphones, and cell phone technologies. The search alsomade use of time-lapse video recording cameras for monitoring likely sites. This method was idealsince it did not lead to the disturbance that is unavoidable with human observers. They played backa 1935 recording of the ivory-billed woodpecker to try to attract the bird. They also used ultra-lightaircraft to conduct aerial surveys. Autonomous sound-recording units recorded the ambient soundsat selected sites, and sampled at 20 kHz for up to 4?h per day, and the results were analysed at CLOto pick out any new recordings that were a match to the known vocalisations of the ivory-billedwoodpecker. Despite the 6,347 field-hours of the Cornell-coordinated search, no definitive sightingwas made in the 2005-2006 season.In February 2007, the University of California, Berkeley announced the installation of a highresolutionintelligent robotic video system developed in collaboration with Texas A&M University.Mounted on an electrical transformer and positioned to view the birds flying through the narrowcorridor surrounding an existing power line, two cameras collect video images, and software examinesthem in real time, discarding any images that have no relevance. The software looks for a large birdflying at 20 to 40 mph. The images saved are then examined by human experts.The camera lens has a focal range of 10 m to 40 mm, giving a horizontal field of view varying from32° to 8°. The cameras are positioned so that they look along the corridor in opposite directions. Theyare mounted 3 metres the water in the marsh, and angled upwards to observe birds flying between thetree-tops through the 50 metre corridor. With a 20° horizontal field of view, each camera observes the356 www.ielts.org