TRITON—Open Telemetry and Location Estimation for Marine Monitoring Based on IoT and LoRa

Biologging and biotelemetry are essential tools to better understand marine species and consequently contribute to increasing our knowledge of marine ecosystems as a whole. Assessing marine megafauna trajectories is traditionally performed with significantly high cost and labor, without guaranteeing the equipment recapture, where quick georeferencing techniques remain proprietary and power intensive. The Internet of Things (IoT) and open radio communication protocols, such as long range (LoRa), provide opportunities for the creation of robust and low-cost sensor networks, which still need to be further tested in the harsh oceanic environment and on marine species. With a vision on having their real-life application on marine species, this study provides a fourfold contribution with LoRa and IoT. First, we review current biotelemetry and biologging, outlining opportunities. Second, we present TRITON, an open telemetry sensor for marine megafauna monitoring. Third, we provide a novel location estimation pipeline based on assisted GPS and simplified pseudorange multilateration using raw satellite data. Fourth, we validate the location estimation pipeline with four in-the-wild studies, mimicking the behavior of marine species, obtaining <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text{500}\;\text{m}$</tex-math></inline-formula> grand average error, using seven satellites. We discuss how the TRITON system may be leveraged for long- and short-term marine megafauna monitoring, paving the road for more LoRa and IoT biotelemetry applications.