Please assist! Which low cost sensor can i use to detect animals on the road while driving?
You could attach a bar across the front of the vehicle, attached on springs that actuates one or more microswitches. When an animal hits it, the switches will close.
It's low cost and will detect animals, which is what you requested.
However, it will generally result in the death of the animals, which makes me unhappy. How do you feel about that? Perhaps you will re-think your requirements?
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The most feasible solution in all likelihood would be to use a fairly high-res camera module and feed the captured image data through a machine vision application that's trained to recognize animals using a large dataset of video imagery of animals crossing in front of cars. With the plethora of dashcam imagery available on YouTube etc. this should be feasible. Some of the higher-end Arduino boards may be just capable of handling this, although I'd look in the direction of more powerful computers (modern Raspberry Pi's etc.) for this.
Alternatively, you could do something with ultrasonic or radar or lidar sensing. Ultrasonic is probably unsuitable as it'll be difficult to get a meaningful range. Radar/lidar will be more expensive due to the hardware involved. Either of these transponder-based approaches will be challenging as you'll have to figure out ways to triangulate and dimension the objects. Positive identification of animals will be virtually impossible; the system won't be able to tell a football from a squirrel etc.
In any case, your seemingly simple question results in rather complex technology. You may now understand why automotive manufacturers have been spending hundreds of millions into this kind of technology.
The easiest option would probably to purchase a modern Tesla; they're capable of detecting animals at least if they're sufficiently big.
I would say some of the more higher-end Arduino boards may be capable of running a pre-trained model. But training that model will require very significant compute resources indeed!
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Interesting problem and very difficult. The target can be coming from the side such as a deer crossing the road. A large bird trying to grab some road kill. It could be snowing, raining, foggy, hot, cold, ice, curves in the road just to name a few things you need to consider. Then if you produce it there is the testing, liability, etc to consider.
What animal? I remember a frog migration across a road. Also a rabbit migration using a very high bridge in Northern California. How to differentiate between human and animal. Is an animal standing beside your road need to be detected? How about a wooden silhouette that is animal shaped?
Passengers work well. The more you have, the more likely someone will see an animal.
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Hi, @gilbert76
Here in Australia, even Tesla's can't identify animals.
Read about 1/3 of the way down the article.
Tom.. 
I blame it on the local fauna. It's just funny down under!
Volvo also notoriously struggled with them:
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