My first guess was that Topher & Co. deploy WiFi throughout the area where the sensors (RFC refers to these as "Guardians") are deployed in the trees?  This connection between the sensors is interesting in itself. Is it a mesh network with distant trees communicating to others nearby who talk to others so as to get to one or more masters that have a connection to the Internet to send alerts to the rangers' mobile phones? Or does each sensor communicate directly to a master that sends out the alert to the rangers? 
  
In either case, there might be some interest in seeing how good the connection is between the sensors and master, as a function of time of day, weather (rain, wind),  signal strength etc., and also detecting whether the sensor is still working, for example if sensor solar cells or batteries fail, sensors get dislodged by animals, or even loggers attack the sensors (climb trees or simply shoot at the sensor).
  
In such a case, PingER could be installed in the masters and each master could probe its sensors via pings (provided in a pinger.xml list) on a regular basis to determine the quality of the connection to its sensors. The master could also gather the data from the sensors to look at the historical data for patterns. In this model the PingER software only needs to be installed in the masters, the sensors simply respond to pings. Also, the master does not need to be an Android, it could be any Linux host such as a Raspberry. 
  
This might be an interesting, new, but different collection/analysis etc. of PingER data that would be aimed just at the Rainforest project, and could be interesting to Amity and the Rainforest people. It does not need much help from SLAC and hence can be an Amity led project. 
The whole thing may depend on whether the sensors are reachable by pings, and if so from where? Further reading (see https://www.blog.google/technology/ai/fight-against-illegal-deforestation-tensorflow/) suggests that the Android sensors may simply send the sound to cloud-based servers over the standard cell phone network. In this case presumably, the sound data is analyzed in the cloud for suspicious behavior and alerts sent to the rangers.  Again some details would be useful on how the sound is sent.  Is it over the Internet or as an audio signal over a cell phone network. Can one ping the sensors from a central point?

Email to Amity

"We (Bebo, Les and Umar)  think that the PingER software on the Android operating system (and Android devices) can play a valuable role in the collection of PingER data and open up new possibilities (especially for mobile devices) for the analysis of that data. However, given the level of expertise, the status of support at SLAC and other PingER collaborators now and in the future, and the availability of Topher*, it will be necessary for Amity to fully take the lead on this research, development/testing, and support.  Also you could get more involved by studying the project code on Github - https://github.com/rfcx. Should you wish to discuss this in more detail, then we are open to a zoom meeting."

Rainforest Connection


 

  • No labels