Miniaturized, Reconfigurable Sensor Node with Localization Functionality for Measurement Data Acquisition and Contact Monitoring between Bats

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The mobile sensor node mounted on the back of the bats is one of the key components that has been investigated during the first period of the research group. This sub-project (TP 7) focused on the mobile node and successfully researched on the system architecture, miniaturization, power management, antennas, structural design, and communication protocol with respect to the currently available amount of energy.From the results of the field trials and in close cooperation with the other sub-projects several new questions arose, which will be investigated during the second project period. A further enhancement of the energy efficiency for ensuring longer periods of operation as well as enabling the use of a smaller battery for lowering the weight of the system below 1.5 g will be the main goal of this work. Also the possibility of adding energy harvesting to the power supply will be investigated. These tasks will also put additional burden on the structural design of the mobile node. Additionally, the field trials showed interesting biological research questions for the social behavior of bats, which can be addressed by monitoring the time and durations of meetings between individuals during flight and resting periods based on estimating the relative distance. For the required asynchronous communication between mobile nodes applicable system concepts will be investigated. In addition to the localization tasks sensing functionalities will be added for the second project period. In a first step, simple physiological parameters, e.g., body temperature will be analyzed. Over the project course of time also the heartbeat of the bat will be monitored. Furthermore, additional sensors will be implemented for coarse estimation of the flying altitude, acceleration, and orientation. Since these additional sensors will increase the energy consumption, they will be activated context sensitively. Therefore, the total re-configurability of the hard- and software will be realized, which enables the in situ modification of any individual mobile node from localization to a sensing platform to analyze a certain biological question. This functionality will be controlled by the ground station network via a long range telemetry link.