Lowri Davies

I wrote a book. Well a 32,000 word dissertation about my project which aimed to produce software to conduct autonomous dolphin monitoring from a robotic sailing boat…

As part of my Software Engineering Masters, we are required to carry out a major final year project which includes coming up with an idea and doing all the relevant market analysis; designing a system to meet the needs outlined by the market analysis and then implementing the design to produce a working system. Finally we had to produce a critical evaluation of our final system and defend our designs, methods and final system in a viva.

Producing this system has played a rather dominating role in my life over the past 6 months and it was a proud day when I finally handed it in two weeks ago. In case anyone is interested, I have included the abstract below:

Research and monitoring of dolphins and other marine mammals remains an area of great interest to scientists as methods have previously been limited to manned boats with expensive running costs or stationary anchored buoys. This project sets out to provide an alternative solution to dolphin monitoring, which can carry out experiments for several weeks at a time without any human intervention. The autonomous passive acoustic monitoring system is designed for use onboard a robotic sailing boat, but could also be adapted for other autonomous platforms such as gliders or UAVs. An open source project called Pamguard was utilised and adapted to produce a system which will record a sample sound file and record data from a water quality testing Sonde whenever a dolphin’s whistle or click train is detected. Data from the Sonde is also recorded on a periodical basis to allow Marine Biologists to compare data in areas of dolphin abundance to areas without.

Davies, L. (2009), “Autonomous Dolphin Monitoring”, Aberystwyth University