Upon reading an article about baby deer—also known as fawns—being accidentally killed by farm machinery during the harvest season, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) student Simon Jobin decided to use his UAS to save the animals from these dangerous situations.

According to Jobin, when fawns hear tractors approaching, they lie down in the tall grass instead of running away, which makes them virtually invisible.

With this in mind, the UAS is used to scan the field following a set course, as it covers every part of the land. It is crucial that Jobin is up early enough in the morning to conduct these scans, because once the sun warms up the ground, the UAS’ thermal camera can't effectively detect the animals' body heat.

​Tiny yellow dots on the screen show the location of the fawns, and once located, the animals have to be moved without any direct physical contact, or they can be covered with a box so that farmers can work around them. Once the farmers are done and the humans have left, the fawns can be found by their mothers.

For Jobin, who also uses his UAS while working for a company that was set up by his brother and other students, the timing of using this technology for this purpose was ideal.

“When I read the article, we'd just bought a thermal camera, and the idea came to me immediately,” Jobin says.

In 2017 alone, Jobin has helped farmers rescue fawns on around ten occasions. The UAS has a 100 percent success rate when it comes to saving the animals.

With such a high success rate with farmers thus far, Jobin and his colleagues are preparing to set up a network of pilots so that they can keep up with demand.

“Harvesting takes place at a specific time of year, and it is not feasible for farmers to get their own drone and thermal camera, which costs almost 25,000 Swiss francs,” Jobin says.

“That's why it would be great to be able to rely on a network of volunteers who already have the right equipment.”

Before UAS were used for this purpose, farmers called upon gamekeepers and hunters to clear the fields of these animals. Jobin says that while gamekeepers have thermal imaging devices of their own, they have to sweep the fields on foot, which flattens the grass and is very time-consuming.