Feasibility of Energy Neutral Wildlife Tracking using Multi-Source Energy Harvesting

2025-07-17

AI Summary

To address the unsustainable practice of capturing and sedating wildlife for battery replacement—causing physiological stress and operational disruption—this paper proposes a maintenance-free wildlife tracking system leveraging multi-source energy harvesting and intelligent energy management. The system innovatively integrates solar and piezoelectric energy harvesting, where the kinetic-energy harvesting circuit simultaneously serves as a motion-sensing proxy, eliminating the need for dedicated behavioral sensors. Energy storage employs supercapacitors; component-level power consumption modeling and energy-aware scheduling algorithms optimize energy utilization; and NB-IoT enables low-power wide-area communication. Evaluated under realistic dynamic field conditions, the system achieves GPS and motion-data sampling every two minutes and reliable hourly data transmission while sustaining long-term energy neutrality. It significantly outperforms single-source harvesting approaches in both data reliability and operational longevity.

Technology Category

• Computer Vision: Motion & Tracking
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Intelligent Robots: Multimodal Perception & Sensor Fusion

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance

Abstract

Long-term wildlife tracking is crucial for biodiversity monitoring, but energy limitations pose challenges, especially for animal tags, where replacing batteries is impractical and stressful for the animal due to the need to locate, possibly sedate, and handle it. Energy harvesting offers a sustainable alternative, yet most existing systems rely on a single energy source and infrastructure-limited communication technologies. This paper presents an energy-neutral system that combines solar and kinetic energy harvesting to enable the tracking and monitoring of wild animals. Harvesting from multiple sources increases the total available energy. Uniquely, the kinetic harvester also serves as a motion proxy by sampling harvested current, enabling activity monitoring without dedicated sensors. Our approach also ensures compatibility with existing cellular infrastructure, using Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT). We present a simulation framework that models energy harvesting, storage, and consumption at the component level. An energy-aware scheduler coordinates task execution based on real-time energy availability. We evaluate performance under realistically varying conditions, comparing task frequencies and capacitor sizes. Results show that our approach maintains energy-neutral operation while significantly increasing data yield and reliability compared to single-source systems, with the ability to consistently sample GPS location data and kinetic harvesting data every two minutes while transmitting these results over NB-IoT every hour. These findings demonstrate the potential for maintenance-free, environmentally friendly tracking in remote habitats, enabling more effective and scalable wildlife monitoring.

Problem

• Overcoming energy limitations in wildlife tracking tags
• Integrating multi-source energy harvesting for sustainable operation
• Enabling reliable data transmission using cellular infrastructure

Innovation

• Combines solar and kinetic energy harvesting
• Uses NB-IoT for cellular infrastructure compatibility
• Energy-aware scheduler for real-time task coordination