Edge-Native, Behavior-Adaptive Drone System for Wildlife Monitoring

Abstract

Wildlife monitoring with drones must balance competing demands: approaching close enough to capture behaviorally-relevant video while avoiding stress responses that compromise animal welfare and data validity. Human operators face a fundamental attentional bottleneck: they cannot simultaneously control drone operations and monitor vigilance states across entire animal groups. By the time elevated vigilance becomes obvious, an adverse flee response by the animals may be unavoidable. To solve this challenge, we present an edge-native, behavior-adaptive drone system for wildlife monitoring. This configurable decision-support system augments operator expertise with automated group-level vigilance monitoring. Our system continuously tracks individual behaviors using YOLOv11m detection and YOLO-Behavior classification, aggregates vigilance states into a real-time group stress metric, and provides graduated alerts (alert vigilance to flee response) with operator-tunable thresholds for context-specific calibration. We derive service-level objectives (SLOs) from video frame rates and behavioral dynamics: to monitor 30fps video streams in real-time, our system must complete detection and classification within 33ms per frame. Our edge-native pipeline achieves 23.8ms total inference on GPU-accelerated hardware, meeting this constraint with a substantial margin. Retrospective analysis of seven wildlife monitoring missions demonstrates detection capability and quantifies the cost of reactive control: manual piloting results in 14 seconds average adverse behavior duration with 71.9% usable frames. Our analysis reveals operators could have received actionable alerts 51s before animals fled in 57% of missions. Simulating 5-second operator intervention yields a projected performance of 82.8% usable frames with 1-second adverse behavior duration,a 93% reduction compared to manual piloting.