UC Berkeley's Ken Goldberg and Texas A&M's Dezhen Song have developed a robotic camera-based system, called an ACONE (Automated Collaborative Observatory Environments), to help in the search for the legendary Ivory-billed woodpecker. (Last year, I wrote about the project here.) Ken presented the research at last weekend's American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting during a panel on the future of robotics.
From Technology Review:
The system hasn't yet captured an image of the ivory-billed woodpecker, but it has won over some ornithologists. "I was somewhat skeptical about the use of a robotic camera system like this to detect birds whizzing across [the sky]," says Ron Rohrbaugh, director of Cornell Lab of Ornithology's ivory-billed-woodpecker recovery project. He thought it would take many more cameras to capture quality clips and properly cover the prime search area. But Rohrbaugh says that now that he has seen the video, he's pleasantly surprised by the results. "The [ACONE] system could have a lot of applications monitoring other wildlife species too, particularly other birds," he says.
While some of the video clips are too blurry to use to determine species, Rohrbaugh says others are quite clear. Using the video captured by the system, the team has already identified a blue heron, a red-tailed hawk, and Canadian geese.
Ultimately, Goldberg says, the researchers would like the software to automatically identify each species.
Link to Technology Review, Link to UC Berkeley press release,
Link to broader coverage of the robotics panel in the San Francisco Chronicle
Previously on BB:
• NASA's woodpecker watch Link
• Recordings of ivory-billed Woodpeckers Link
• Ken Goldberg profile Link
• Ken Goldberg's telerobotic take on Berkeley in the 1960s Link
