Use of A UAV Base Station for Searching and Bio-inspired Covert Video Surveillance of Tagged Wild Animals

Small tagging devices are enabling scientists to track targeted wild animals, such as migrant birds. In this paper, we introduce a prototype solution for searching and covert video surveillance of tagged wild animals based on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) mounted base station (BS). We first present the concept design of a novel UAV-BS with a motion-controlled directional antenna for searching tagged wild animals in the 3-dimensional (3D) space. To reduce the disturbance of UAV to tagged wild animals, we further propose a bio-inspired motion camouflage UAV navigation algorithm for covert video surveillance of wild animals. Computer simulations show the effectiveness of the proposed method. This is the first paper on covert video surveillance of wild animals using UAVs.