Drones with Artificial Intelligence to Monitor Sea Turtles in the TRNC

Scientists from the Middle East Technical University Northern Cyprus Campus (METU) have developed a tracking system for sea turtles that lay eggs on the island's beaches. Drones equipped with artificial intelligence will notify volunteers of the need to protect the turtles. The project based on artificial intelligence was created by students in collaboration with professors from computer engineering, electrical engineering, electronics, and aerospace engineering, with the support of the Tashkent Nature Park.

The developed artificial intelligence system scans specific beaches across the island using UAVs and automatically informs volunteers when turtles arrive. "Usually, volunteers have to physically scan the beach to protect these turtles. As part of the project, we have developed a machine learning-based system that automatically notifies when turtles come to lay eggs," explained one of the project's authors.

During the project, students from the fields of electronics, computer engineering, aviation, and astronautics gathered and conducted interdisciplinary research. Initially, a dataset for the artificial intelligence algorithm was prepared using images of caretta caretta family sea turtles. Using this dataset, artificial intelligence was trained to recognize sea turtles.

Subsequently, in collaboration with aviation students, a UAV was developed that scans the beach with cameras with various functions, processes images, and can make automatic decisions. "Next in line is artificial intelligence that detects the hatching of sea turtle hatchlings," say the project's authors.