Abstract

The study, design and development of a monitoring system for wildlife road crossing problem is addressed in this thesis. Collisions between fauna and vehicles is a relevant issue in several mountain and rural regions and a valuable low-cost solution has not yet been identified. In particular, the proposed system is composed by a network of sensors installed along road margins, in order to detect wildlife events, (e.g., approaching, leaving or crossing the road), thus to promptly warn the incoming drivers. The sensor nodes communicate wirelessly among the network thus collecting the sensed information in a control unit for data storage, processing and statistics. The detection process is performed by the wireless nodes, which are equipped with low-cost Doppler radars for real-time identification of wildlife movements. In detail, different technologies valuable for solving the problem and related off-the-shelf solutions have been investigated and properly tested in order to validate their actual performance considering the specific problem scenario. A final classification based on specific parameters has allowed identifying the Doppler radar system as the better low-cost technology for contributing to the problem objective. The performance of the proposed system has also been investigated in a real scenario, which has been identified to be the actual pilot site for the monitoring system. This confirms the system capability of movements detection in the road proximity, thus defining a security area along it, where all occurring events may be identified.