The same lightweight VHF tags biologists already use. The drone carries the receiver — recovering weak signals a ground team would miss, from a safe distance in the air.
as many tagged animals localized in one flight — in about half the time a human tracker needs for one.
detection range, up from 1.5 km as onboard noise engineering matured.
more ground area searchable per flight, from that same range gain.
Ground radio-tracking a tagged animal can take hours per fix — one internal estimate puts it at roughly 20 person-hours of fieldwork for a single bat location. Dense brush, water, and terrain block the signal outright. Crewed aircraft cover more ground faster, but aircraft accidents are a leading cause of death among wildlife biologists.
UAV-RT puts the receiver on a drone instead of a person. The animal keeps wearing the same lightweight VHF tag it always has. Altitude gives the range of an aircraft with none of the risk, and onboard signal processing pulls a weak, noisy tag pulse out of the air that a human on headphones would miss.
First real-world localization by the system, tracking wild kiwi on Ponui Island with Victoria University of Wellington and Massey University.
Ongoing work with Painted Dog Conservation in Hwange has pushed detection range to 6–7 km — about 6x a ground tracker's range.
Supporting a pine marten reintroduction in Cumbria, the system found two tagged animals the ground survey team couldn't locate.
Continuously funded by the National Science Foundation since 2016 (awards #1556417 and #2104570), with field results published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution, IEEE Access, and, in review, Journal of Field Robotics.
