•Notícia

href="https://saladepremsa2.upc.edu/en"" target="_blank">Terrassa School of Industrial and Aeronautical Engineering (ETSEIAT), and Aleix Ripoll, Aleix Figueres and Hugo Bertiche, students at the Castelldefels School of Telecommunications and Aerospace Engineering (EETAC), designed the drone for the Wildlife Conservation Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Challenge. The drone will allow parks such as the Kruger National Park in South Africa to control poaching much more effectively and economically. The new drone is a fixed-wing aircraft that incorporates technology for detecting rhinos and elephants from the air and sending real-time information on their location.

The Wildlife Conservation UAV Challenge, based in South Africa, announced an international competition to find an effective solution to the tragic poaching of elephants and rhinos. The UPC students are participating in this competition with a prototype drone that they designed and built as a bachelor's thesis project, with the help and support of HEMAV, a start-up created by UPC alumni and based on the Baix Llobregat Campus in Castelldefels.

The students designed the UAV, called Ranger Drone, as a low-cost device for use in African National Parks. The drone flies without remote control and is programmed to monitor areas of forest or savannah based on coordinates loaded in its system. It incorporates a thermal camera to detect poachers from the air and the students are working to incorporate a sound detection system.

The information obtained by the drone will be sent instantly using ultra-high frequency telemetry or GSM (mobile phone) technology to the base of the park rangers, who will know where the animals are and the area that is being monitored at any given time. According to Arnau Garcia, "This will greatly help the rangers to monitor the herds of elephants and rhinos. They'll find them more quickly thanks to the coordinates transmitted to them through the system." This means that "the protection of animals will be much more effective".

The students have tested the Ranger Drone on a sheep farm in Huesca, Spain and have tested the thermal cameras with elephants and rhinos at several locations, such as Barcelona Zoo.

The World Wildlife Fund estimates that there are between 470,000 and 690,000 elephants in Africa, where poaching has increased by 63% over the last ten years.

According to a study by Professor George Wittemyer of Colorado State University (USA) conducted for the Samburu National Reserve in Kenya, poachers killed about 100,000 elephants in Africa between 2010 and 2012. The increase in poaching of the world's largest land animals is due to rising demand for ivory in China and other Asian countries. According to the same study, the 2% annual decline in the population of these animals exceeds their intrinsic growth rate. Central Africa, Tanzania and Mozambique are the areas most affected by poaching. In Central Africa alone the elephant population decreased by 63.7% between 2002 and 2012. The study also reports that poaching increases when the price of ivory rises above $30 per kilo.

To build Ranger Drone, the UPC students sought outside help. In programming the software and the on-board sensors, they received support from Wildlife Conservation UAV Challenge and from researchers of the Telecommunications Technology Centre of Catalonia (CTTC). In developing the prototype's architecture, they received advice from the HEMAV team located in the European Space Agency Business Incubation Centre Barcelona on the Baix Llobregat Campus in Castelldefels. They are also being advised by the biologists Pablo Schapira and Marina Mònico, who have extensive experience in African national parks and are providing the students with first-hand information.

The UPC's Ranger Drone team is one of seven groups participating in the competition organised by Wildlife Conservation UAV Challenge, for which 120 teams signed up initially. The competition organisers realised that each team was presenting a different technical problem, so they decided to put all the participants in contact with each other and convert the competition into a collaborative project to build the most effective and efficient drone.

In March of this year the students are due to present the project in South Africa and to carry out the definitive tests with the teams from other countries. The UPC students have also entered for another contest in the United Arab Emirates, Drones for Good, in which teams and companies from all over the world are seeking new applications for UAVs. The prize is worth one million dollars. The students have completed the first phase and will visit Dubai from 3 to 8 February to qualify for the final. You can vote for this project on the following website.