Trapping Wild Hogs
State harneses power by using cellular network
- By Adam Cohen
- Apr 01, 2013
Helping the state of Tennessee with a
solar-powered, IP video-based solution
to catch wild hogs, ICRealtime
has installed an autonomous remedy
by harnessing the power of Verizon’s
nationwide cellular network.
Wild hogs cause an estimated $1.5 billion annually
nationwide in damages to agriculture, wildlife habitats
and waterways. In addition, they carry diseases
harmful to livestock, other animals and humans.
The Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency
(TWRA) has the daunting task of controlling the
wild hog population. An initial, informal return-oninvestment
study revealed that the state pays thousands
of dollars per year, mostly in man-hours, trapping
and dispatching these hogs.
Most of the hours are spent attempting to learn
the hogs’ feeding patterns by reviewing amateur snapshots
taken by TWRA staff. The inexpensive, standalone
cameras record only still pictures on an SD card
and offer no live viewing.
This requires someone to travel to each site to retrieve
pictures and replace camera batteries, or the
cameras would fail and miss vital trending information.
Additionally, scores of painstaking hours are
spent reviewing images to establish when the hogs
gather to feed inside a trap.
Once a pattern is determined, two officers schedule
the best time to wait for hours in a tree stand for the
hogs to return to the trap. Using a watchful eye and
a keychain-sized remote control, they hit a button to
trap as many hogs as they can.
IC Realtime’s innovative M2M solution acts as a
digital force multiplier to increase the officers’ productivity
by enabling them to be in two places at once.
After deployment, these systems keep a watchful eye
24/7 on each trap.
The system records the movement in HD, then
sends out snapshots of all of the action, instantly
alerting the officer, who can be offsite conducting
other duties for the state.
These systems can be customized to work in virtually
any environment. They monitor themselves and
automatically send out system health status reports,
such as solar power wattage, battery voltage, charging
capacity and temperature.
The system is built with self-correcting mechanisms
to power down and recharge when sunshine is
lacking. The cameras additionally send out alerts if
any abnormalities occur.
The ICmyLIFE Portal allows these remote systems
to send video and alerts to the cloud from long-term
storage, further reducing costs by limiting the amount
of video storage devices needed to be deployed onsite.
This M2M cloud-based platform provides live video
on demand without special software needs, or requiring
staff to remember IP addresses and passwords.
Features such as instant time-lapse playback,
advanced calendar searching, event-based notifications
and digital output controls
for switches, relays and lights help
customers save money, one click at
a time.
This article originally appeared in the April 2013 issue of Security Today.
About the Author
Adam Cohen is the CEO of the M2M Advisors division of ICRealtime.