Accelerometers for Koalas

Projects General Guidance
1

Hi all,

I'm currently working on a project focused around building a tracking collar for koalas. The ecologists I'm working with are very interested in monitoring the animal's behavior by looking at movement. Things like stationary, climbing or running on the ground should be easy enough with an accelerometer however they are also talking about sensing movement as fine as the animals inhalation before bellowing (possibly vibration?).

Has anyone had any experience using accelerometers and/or gryo's to achieve this? The accelerometer's I have used in the past seemed to give pretty erratic readings however they have been very basic models. I read in some of the air craft forums about combing the data with gyro data via a mathematical filter, however I wanted to keep power consumption to a minimum.

Cheers,
Sam

2

The particular accelerometer used determines its sensitivity to movement. The key to using accelerometers is to know what they are, and are not, capable of.

For an aircraft, the accelerometer is typically used to create an autopilot. The pilot needs to sense changes in pitch, roll, and yaw, and correct for them, so, it is important to know how much the plane has moved about each axis, and how fast it is moving about each axis.

Sensing movement from breathing, or jumping, running, climbing, without caring about exactly which axis the motion occurred about, or how rapidly the velocity is changing, makes things much simpler.

I don't think a gyro is appropriate for you. You are not trying to measure, or control, motion in ways that a gyro does.