A solution for the elephant-human conflict

Abstract

The Human-Elephant conflict is a serious problem that has existed for decades in Sri Lanka. Although the Department of Wildlife Conservation has implemented several strategies such as electric fencing, translocation and GPS/VHF collars, approximately 150 elephants and 50 humans are killed every year while a lot more are affected. The solution developed through this research incorporates a server and a tracking device. The latter, fixed inside each elephants' collar, consumes an ultra-low idle power of 4.7?W and intelligently decides to transmit location information to the remote server via GSM. This paper discusses how the latest technology has been utilized to dynamically bias harvesting sources to extract as low as 10?W and also how such harvesting methods can be implemented inside a collar. The device built is also able to securely accept over-the-air configurations sent by the Department of Wildlife Conservation aiding remote configuration. The proposed tracker unit, once attached, is able to transmit 12 or more locations a day and with a daily solar generation of 271.8mWh efficiently harvested to a 5000mAh LiPo battery. The device is expected to operate for more than 5 years without any human interaction. The main server accepts and decrypts the location information sent from the tracker device whilst maintaining records. It also operates as a web server. Therefore, a privileged user may securely log in to view all elephants in a map. Moreover, it generates alerts when an elephant intrudes into a human territory and is implemented by adding extra hardware to a low cost embedded Linux computer.