Over the past year a group of six volunteer undergraduate student have been working with our lab to design and build a whale blow simulator named WhaleAchoo. Their work helped MDL secure funding from the Kenneth M Molson Foundation do develop an autonomous drone. This drone, named the drone Gesundheit, will collect the biological samples from whales. Four graduate students are working on developing Gesundheit and also this project links our marine and flight works.
Our Gesundheit drone, is a custom aerial vehicle with sensors to detect and track whales. It is also able to fly through whale blows at the optimal moment. The figure above is a schematic of the process; starting at the lefthand side, Gesundheit acquires a target via onboard sensors and lowers to a safe standoff distance > 5m to track the whale or surrogate. During tracking, Gesundheit will utilize a neural network object recognition to identify the specific whale species. The identification will be based on the whale’s size, shape, and blow characteristics. Additionally, based on the identified whale species, Gesundheit will continually optimize a descent path to collect a biological sample. At an opportune whale blow, Gesundheit will start its autonomous dive to collect the sample and return to base. During our development phase, we will track and use Whale Achoo, our existing whale-blow surrogate.