Courtesy of CSIRO's expertise in wireless sensor technology, Santa could soon be using the Internet to see what the reindeer at Sweden's Lycksele Zoo get up to for the rest of the year.

Helping Santa keep an eye on Donner and Blitzen

Reference: 08/235

Santa will soon be using the Internet to see what reindeer near the North Pole in Sweden’s Lycksele Zoo are getting up to.

• 23 December 2008

Courtesy of CSIRO’s expertise in wireless sensor technology, by the middle of 2010 anyone will be able to take a virtual tour of the zoo – the largest in northern Sweden and home to some 400 mainly Arctic animals – from the animals’ point of view.

Using what will be the largest outdoor wireless network of cameras and microphones in the world, virtual visitors will be able to ’walk‘ through the zoo seeing what the animals see. 

Far more advanced than simply webcams stuck on trees, CSIRO’s network will process video and audio data collected by around 100 static sensor nodes to determine the animals’ movements and whether they are grazing, sleeping, or just ’chilling’ waiting for next Christmas.

“There won’t be a human operator watching a bank of screens because the cameras and microphones work autonomously,” says CSIRO’s Dr Tim Wark. “It’s only when they determine there’s an animal close by that they’ll send video data back to a central point.”

CSIRO – a world leader in wireless sensor networks for outdoor use –¬ is joining with Sweden’s Umeå University to build the network.

“We're providing our solar-powered FLECK™ platform and a new digital signal processor to handle the images,” Dr Wark says. “We'll also have researchers funded from the project here at our lab in Queensland so we can jointly focus on some of the research challenges."

CSIRO’s FLECK platform is renowned for being robust, but Dr Wark says this application will be particularly challenging. There’s very little sunlight during winter and the temperature can drop to a camera-freezing -30 C for weeks at a time.

“Other zoos have webcams but none are collecting as much and as detailed information as we will,” says project leader Johannes Karlsson of Umeå University’s Digital Media Lab.

“The majority of sensors will be static, but we’re also investigating putting collars on the animals. Reindeer are one of those we’re most likely to tag,” he says.

“We hope to put cameras in the collars, but we don't want to put the animal to sleep every week to change the battery, so we need to have some kind of mechanism to harvest energy, for example from the animals motion.”

Funds from the European Union will help pay the cost of sending a post-doctorate researcher from Sweden to work on the project with researchers at CSIRO ICT Centre’s Autonomous Systems laboratory in Brisbane next year.

Download image at: Helping Santa keep an eye on Donner and Blitzen.

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