Australia will deploy drones with AI in order to detect and prevent potential shark attacks!steemCreated with Sketch.

in #news7 years ago

Australia is the country with the second highest number of shark attacks each year, and annually 2 or 3 people end up dead from the attacks. The government is willing to spend a lot of money to prevent these attacks, despite the fact that only 2-3 deaths yearly is extremely little for a country with over 22 million people. I’m one of the people that thinks that this is an acceptable risk when swimming in the ocean, and that sharks have an unfair reputation, but the drones I’m going to write about today is a good step in the right direction when it comes to protecting swimmers and surfers without risking the lives of the sharks involved.

How AI drones will protect humans from shark attacks

The drones are equipped with a shark detection system, an AI that is able to find, identify and distinguish sharks from other marine animals. It has a success rate of 90 % shark detection, which is extremely good compared to the low 20 – 30 % success rate of humans who do the same task from aerial photos.

Not only will the drones look for sharks in the water, it will also automatically alert nearby beaches be using a megaphone. Hopefully this will stop people from going into the ocean until the sharks are no longer nearby.


The is what the shark detection system looks like. Image by University of Technology Sydney’s School of Software.

In addition to provide shark detections for humans, it will also help in scientific research by mapping the areas where the sharks are travelling. Some researchers believe this information will be very useful in the future by giving us the data needed to calculate where the sharks are likely to swim to next.

The drones are soon getting ready to be deployed

The University of Technology Sydney’s School of Software is very happy with the software they created for detecting sharks, and hope to deploy the drones in test areas in New South Wales and Queensland soon.

In order to detect the sharks the drones are using an AI software that have been looking at aerial shark videos in order to learn to detect the sharks in the water. The drones themselves are based on the JTT T60 drones, and will only have a flight time of 15 - 30 minutes will all the camera equipment it is carrying. This might not sound like a lot, but it is typically more than enough to survey the area for nearby sharks.

The drones will be beneficial to the sharks as well!

The new AI drones will also be very good for the sharks because hopefully they will lead to a lower use of shark nets. These submerged nets are placed around beaches in order to stop sharks from getting in to the beach, but they are have some serious problems such as catching rare or endangered marine animal species in the net.

The new drones will also likely lead to a reduction in the usage of helicopters for shark detecting, saving the government a lot of money in the long-term. This is also obviously better for the environment, and helicopters use a whole lot of fuel to stay up in their air. In addition to this, helicopters are extremely noisy, and are theorized to have a negative impact on some marine animals.

I really hope that this drone AI shark detection projects turns out to be really successful, and it would be amazing if this could help humans and sharks co-exist more peacefully. It’s really unfortunate that people get killed from shark attacks, but it’s almost just as unfortunate that sharks get killed just because of their bad reputation. Anyway, it's so cool to see technology and conservation efforts mix together to create a strategy that can save both sharks, humans and other marine animals in the process.

Thanks for reading

Thanks for reading my short post about the new drone shark detection system in Australia. I hope you enjoyed the post, and feel free to leave a comment below.
If you want to learn more, check out the article by Reuters. It has some more information for those of you that are interested.

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That's very cool. I have such conflicting feelings about drones, my inner geek absolutely adores them, but my inner critical analyst whispers to me that their threat to privacy isn't as innocuous as might be thought. Not that I think the sharks will mind their privacy being infringed :)

its amazing technology,,

how far distances the drone will sence the sharks move from it and detected?

This is really good idea. I was also thinking to use drones in detecting bushfires in tropical regions and track those who set it. I guess it is the biggest challenge of conservation to stop bushfires. Without it we would probably never be able to procet the tropical forest.

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@martin.mikes
Co-founder and coordinator of @kedjom-keku association
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