We are going to start the publication by referring to the CETI project that since 2020 has used technology to track sperm whales and collect data, let's say, in a less stressful way for the animals, using robotics and AI they work with the ambition of one day decoding the vocalization of these giants.

They are using drones with suction cup tags and when applied they read bioacoustics, heart rate, depth and body orientation, a package of clues to understand how they live and talk, the challenge is time, sperm whales can dive for 45 minutes and stay only 8 to 10 minutes on the surface, that is why the team chose fast and maneuverable FPV aerial drones and instead of aquatic ones.

Today the pilots operate remotely and in the tests the average placement of the tag was close to 1 minute and 15 seconds, the most common failures, the approach time against the movement of the waves and the animal, the last maneuver is the most difficult, to resist the sea, the drones received hypermeabilization, special grease in the engines and 3D protectors on the tips of the arms to keep the propellers away from the body of the whale.

A custom interface releases the tag on contact and the open source FPV platform provides power and payload capacity without losing agility, in addition to making field maintenance cheaper and easier.

In the brain part, the team follows a conservative line, nothing leaves everything on the FPV autopilot, everything begins with a vision system that detects size, orientation and target region, from there, a classic control takes the drone to the safe point and shoots the tag.

The success rate already exceeds 55% and the method is less invasive than the manual one. The next step is to automate more and integrate balls, a surface with hydrophores to detect emerging whales and feed the prediction algorithms. If it works on a large scale, the CETI creates the database that could bring us closer to the alphabet of sperm whales.