The autonomous acoustic buoy

Abstract

Treball desenvolupat dins el marc del programa 'European Project Semester'.

The Acoustic Buoy is a project between the Laboratory of Applied Bioacoustics (LAB) and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). In areas that the human activities produce high noise levels, such as oil exploration or construction, there is a need to monitor the environment for the presence of cetaceans. Another need is for fishing, to prevent endangered species from being killed. This can be done with an Autonomous Acoustic Buoy (AAB). Mooring or anchoring at to the seafloor can be costly, especially in deep water, for these situations a free floating buoy is required that can monitor the environment and send an alert message when cetaceans are detected nearby or noise levels have exceeded a certain threshold. As an ongoing project different components of the overall concept have been researched and developed, a buoy has been designed, software and hardware have been developed for data acquisition, and a watchdog system has been built to ensure a safe and autonomous unattended operation of the electronics. But one of the key things the overall concept is still missing is the communication system, in short a system needed for transferring the collected data to the end user. Therefore our problem statement is as follows, how can data be transferred from a collecting buoy to the end user and be presented in an accessible and easy to use interface. In order to monitor a large area several autonomous acoustic buoys can be deployed. In order to increase the radio coverage every AAB has the capability of acting as a node in a wireless mesh network so the alarm can automatically find its way to the ship, base or shore point where the end user control station is located. The overall system consists of two parts, the first is the transmission of data between the buoy and the control station and second is the user-interface for displaying alert messages on a map for the end user. Both parts are going to be developed during the European Project Semester 2013