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elephant-deterrence devices

A project log for Elephant AI

a system to prevent human-elephant conflict by detecting elephants using machine vision, and warning humans and/or repelling elephants

neil-k-sheridanNeil K. Sheridan 05/11/2017 at 18:340 Comments

The elephant detection devices will notify these to begin their deterrence scripts either via bluetooth or via GPRS/3G/4G modems. The scripts will contain instructions for playing audio from pseudo-randomly selected bee or tiger .ogg files stored on the memory cards.

Thoughts on using more active approaches

I did mention earlier the idea of firing chilli balls to deter elephants. There is some research on this published:

Repelling elephants with a chilli pepper gas dispenser: field tests and practical use in Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe from 2009 to 2013 (Le Bel et al., 2015)

Here they fired ping pong ball projectiles containing chilli pepper using a pneumatic weapon. The idea has been tried by others too!

So if I used this approach, I would mount a pneumatic weapon on a rotating platform. I'd add camera and take real-time video once we had elephants present (per notification from elephant detection devices). I'd track their motion using camera, then adjust position of rotating platform and thus weapon. And then go ahead and fire the chilli balls at the presumed location of elephants!

Drawbacks are that chilli balls are quite large so you would need a large barrel size for the pneumatic weapon. That means it would need a large reservoir of compressed air + a compressor! Not to mention I am unsure how it could be automatically reloaded?

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