Razana Drone System

Primary Investigator: Jesse McKinney

As the developer of Razana, A Primate Conservation International funded research system, I 
designed, engineered, constructed, and programmed a novel autonomous drone chassis with 
onboard machine learning capabilities, and a series of modular smart sensor units. Together the 
base drone and modules form a smart, highly autonomous, ecological monitoring drone system
capable of traveling up to 280 km per flight. Currently the prototype unit is feature complete, tested, and simply awaiting the end of the pandemic to ship for field operations in the 2021 field season.

With the prototype unit complete we hope to in the future fund a new research program that will extend Razana from a single drone operating in Madagascar, into a global network of drone systems operating across the tropics. These aerial  robots will be linked through an online community to facilitate the sharing of new sensor module designs, machine learning and other forms of artificial intelligence algorithms, and datasets collected by the system. Through this community, a researcher in one tropical environment will be able to quickly gather data across a global network of tropical sites, facilitating holistic study of tropical research questions at scales, costs, flexibility, and refresh rates unmatched by other technologies such as satellite imagery.