ACONE versus Woody
p2pnet.net news:- Texas A&M University and the University of California, Berkeley, Computer scientists from are going hunting. For wood peckers. With ACONE the robot.
The Automated Collaborative Observatory for Natural Environments system will be installed in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge to help natural scientists from Cornell University’s Laboratory of Ornithology and the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission find the rare ivory-billed woodpecker.
Doctors Dezhen Song, assistant professor in Texas A&M’s Department of Computer Science, and Kenneth Y. Goldberg, professor in UC Berkeley’s departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, and Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, developed ACONE to scan the skies near Brinkley, Ark., for birds.
“If the system can catch any kind of bird, that’s a success for us,” Song said. “But if it catches an ivory-bill, that’s a bonus.”
With a grant from the National Science Foundation, Song and Goldberg programmed ACONE to distinguish birds from other objects and only record the birds with its two digital cameras.
“It’s a fast, flying object,” Song said. “And also, the shape of the object — the shape of the bird — isn’t regular. It’s deformable, and from the lighting conditions, it’s very difficult to capture.”
The robot stores images of the birds it has recorded in the hard disks of its computer, Logic Supply Inc.’s S-625F. The computer as well as the cameras are housed in weatherproof cases.
Also See:
ACONE - Computer scientists join in search for ivory-billed woodpecker, February 17s, 2007
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