9 September, 2024- Scientists studying dolphins confronted a hurdle. Assessing their health in the wild has been tricky. Researchers in Texas and Oklahoma created a drone-based system. This system may shortly resolve the issue. This device seeks to diagnose the functions of dolphins while at sea.
Seven years ago, Professor Jason Bruck encountered a problem. At the time, drones such as the SnotBot were being used to assess whale health. Ocean Alliance and Olin College of Engineering built SnotBot. Yet, this method was unsuitable for tiny cetaceans. It could not study dolphins and porpoises.
The Snotbot system works by flying a quadcopter through the spray from a whale’s blowhole. This allows the collection of biological samples. Whales have blowholes that reach up to 50 feet into the air. This makes them rather easy targets for this technique. But it did not work for smaller cetaceans.
Dolphins are more susceptible to flying objects and the sounds they make. The quadcopter’s downdraft would scatter the plume. The plume comes from the dolphin’s blowhole. This made it impossible to collect samples.
Bruck realized that traditional methods were not effective. He then asked, “How do we solve this problem?”
While Bruck was wrestling with this issue. So he moved from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland to Oklahoma State University. At OSU, he encountered the drone research team, which was working on quieter drones.
Jamey Jacob, a professor at OSU, took up the story. “Jason presented us with this challenge,” Jacob explained. “He wished to figure out if our aeronautics learners could work together on an outcome.”
The OSU drone team began working on a stealthy unmanned aerial vehicle design. They needed to approach dolphins without disturbing them. Dolphins have a blind spot behind them, which was key to the drone’s approach strategy.
The team soon realized that small quad rotors were too noisy and made the dolphins react. They abandoned the quadcopter design in favor of a quieter fixed-wing unmanned UAV. This design also offered the benefit of longer flight endurance. It allowed the drone to cover miles over the ocean.
The project’s name was PHASM, or Passive Health Assessment for Sea Mammals. The OSU team used off-the-shelf drone components to build a UAV. It is an electric vertical takeoff and landing (EVTOL) model. This drone could be hand-launched from a boat. Operators guided it using first-person view technology. The crew utilized a net to capture the drone on the return on investment flight.
The team gave each drone model a pet name. “Flipper,” for example, was its most current version. Bruck mentioned that the final version was a modified HEEWING T2 Cruza. It featured new electronics and a specialized nose cone.
The siphon is the drone’s critical component. It captures the minimal amount of chuff expelled from a dolphin’s blowhole. The siphon features an iris that opens like a flower and a vacuum that sucks in the breath.
To test the siphon, the OSU team created a chuff simulator in the laboratory. This device mimicked the volume of material expelled by a live dolphin. The researchers carried out flight experiments in the lab. They also tested at OSU’s drone flight field. Later, they tested on live dolphins at Dolphin Quest in Oahu, Hawaii.
With successful tests completed, the researchers are now seeking approval. They plan to start drone flights to study the dolphin population in Galveston Bay. They aim to begin by December or early January. This population consists of about 160 animals that remain in the area. The idea is to find and examine them from a boat.
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