Research team from SLIIT finds a new solution for Human Elephant Conflict

A research project led by Dr. Nuwan Kuruwitaarachchi from the Faculty of Technology at the University of Sri Jayewardenepura and group of research students at Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology ( SLIIT) have found a more efficient and more effective solution for the Human- Elephant conflict in Sri Lanka.

“The proposed model is a wireless sensor- based network which primarily uses geophones, microwave Radar sensors and Infrared beams to detect elephants and integrate with alerting and elephant scare away systems,” said Dr. Nuwan Kuruwitaarachchi.

In the first stage of research, researchers discovered a method to detect elephants using the vibration of elephant footfalls gathered from geophones, readings from microwave radar systems and readings from IR beam systems developed by the researchers. This method is not used or tested in this kind of study so far.

The second phase was conducted to process data gathered from geophones and a reliable communication method using LoRa and NRF24l01 units was built. Third stage is the result of previous stages to develop the method to scare away elephants using flashlights, smart electric fences and alerting people using a siren system.

At present IR beam-based and geophone- based elephant detection methods and intersystem communication systems are developed and checked with real world scenarios. And a prototype of the elephant scares away system created. Researchers faced a problem to clearly identify elephants from geophone gathered data therefore neural networks used to separate correlation co-effects of elephants’ footfall vibrations from other noises.

A research team at the Faculty of Technology at the University of Sri Jayewardenepura continues enhancing this study which involves designing and developing vibration detection sensors. The test environment for this with flash lights and IR sensors is under construction in the Habarana area in Anuradhapura district currently. After new device integrations with more real word experiments, this study’s results will be contributed immensely to solve the human elephant conflict.

This study was published in IEEE International Conference for Emerging Technolo g y (INCET) in 2021.