Very carefully might be your first response but there is a technical answer as well.
The technical answer involves a design challenge called ElephantEdge to create the world’s most advanced tracker to protect elephants in their natural habitats from poachers, trophy hunters and habitat destruction. Supported by Hackster.io, an Avnet community, and Smart Parks, a provider of advanced sensor solutions to conserve endangered wildlife and others, the challenge provides a framework to collaborate on the development of a next generation tracking collar. Better sensors provide situational awareness and greater insight into animal behavior for improved protection.
The design challenge’s focus involves creating the software to run on newly built hardware, including learning models and telemetry dashboards. These tools will provide tracking, health vitals, motion, environmental anomalies and more.
Design goals for the new collar include longer battery life, greater range and improved accuracy over existing solutions. These goals will be achieved by leveraging Avnet’s IoTConnect Platform and Edge Impulse machine learning technology. Edge Impulse addresses machine learning to enable the use of 99% of the sensor data that is discarded due to cost. Additional hardware and software will come from Western Digital, Nordic Semiconductors, Taoglas, u-blox, Vulcan EarthRanger and Microsoft.
Challenge participants will receive free access to products and technology to help create their solutions as well as a chance to win up to $5,000 in prizes. As a close advisor for the challenge, World Wildlife Fund will work with the development team and test early prototypes. The winning prototype will be used in 10 elephant collars to be deployed by Smart Parks in selected African parks.
For more information on the ElephantEdge Challenge and to register, visit https://www.hackster.io/contests/ElephantEdge.
