Whilst working for Q42‘s tech-for-good venture Hack the Planet, I got involved with developing a system to prevent/mitigate human-bear conflict in the Carpathian mountains in Romania. When a bear gets used to humans, they become very hard to deter and become a significant risk for humans and livestock. The only solution then is to either try to capture and re-locate the bear, or to kill it. Either way, it is better to prevent bears from getting used to humans to begin with, and that’s where this project comes in.
Over the course of half a year, my colleagues and I got to work designing a system consisting of 4G connected motion triggered cameras and “repellers”. A repeller is a device that features a loudspeaker and a bright strobe light. Whenever it gets activated, it will start making noise and flashing its light. The system works as follows:
My contributions to this project were:
There were many diverse challenges to overcome in this project, ranging from software to hardware. This great variety of challenges made it a very enjoyable project to work on.
