Turtle Tech

To better understand the behavior of multiple sea turtle species along Florida’s Space Coast, we teamed up with Northrop Grumman and the Brevard Zoo to launch a drone-based surveillance effort. The Turtle Tech project, leveraging two different unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), aim to provide conservation insights by fine-tuning the operations and computer visioning systems for identification of individual sea turtles – including their species, gender and even unique markings. 

Florida’s eastern coast is the most popular loggerhead nesting site in the world. The Space Coast also draws green sea turtles, massive leatherbacks, the Kemp’s Ridley and, a bit further to the south, the Hawksbill. About 25% of the world’s overall sea turtle population is born in Florida.  Although sea turtles may lay 100 or more eggs in each nest, estimates suggest that only one in 1,000 to 10,000 hatchlings will reach adulthood. Most species are threatened or endangered by natural as well as human threats.

Our team uses two types of unmanned aircrafts: the Applied Aeronautics Albatross with vertical take-off and landing capability, and the DJI Matrice 210. The DJI platform can carry multiple payloads and capture finer-grain images of sea turtles while the lightweight and fixed-wing Albatross can cover more ground for a longer period of time. The Albatross will do the initial wide-area detection, and then, when we find turtles of interest, the DJI platform will hover and look at identifying markers like scute patterns on a turtle’s carapace.  We are designing an optical platform for taking pictures and video across the ocean and use machine-learning to recognize and identify turtles in real time.

Check these news articles for more information: Link1, Link2