An Energy-Efficient GPS System to Uncover the Secret Lives of Flying Foxes

Journal Watch report logo, link to report landing page

Our ancestors ended up committed animal trackers, often adhering to a wounded animal for times at a time. But the development of the Worldwide Positioning Process (GPS) has produced it a great deal simpler to track animals: basically tag an animal and observe its movements from afar.

When this system is better in a lot of ways than adhering to tracks, blood trails, and droppings, making use of GPS trackers will come with its personal troubles. In certain, reporting one’s area primarily based on GPS far more regularly necessitates greater electricity intake. And if you want to precisely track an animal for a lengthy time, you may perhaps will need to use a even larger battery than you (or the animal) would like.

To deal with this problem, researchers have created a new variety of GPS tracker that predicts how a great deal an animal may perhaps go, accounts for the all round electricity funds of the tracking product, and then adjusts electricity intake appropriately. The design and style, created to track flying foxes in Australia, is explained in a research revealed five February in IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing.