Researchers developing robots designed to combat killer starfish and protect an important World Heritage site might sound like the plot of the next SyFy channel movie, but actually it’s the latest attempt by Australian experts to keep the Great Barrier Reef from dying off completely.
According to NBC News and Mashable, one of the greatest threats facing the Great Barrier Reef is a creature known as the crown-of-thorns starfish. The starfish feed on coral, the websites said, and an outbreak may have a “devastating” impact on the health of the heritage site. In fact, some estimates suggest they are responsible for 40 percent of the reef’s recent decline.
To keep things from getting worse, researchers from the Queensland University of Technology have developed the anti-crown-of-thorns starfish robot (COTSbot), which will fight back against the starfish by injecting them with a lethal dose of bile salts. Previously, this task had to be done by humans, but the COTSbot will use a pneumatic injection arm to inject the starfish.
“Human divers are doing an incredible job of eradicating this starfish from targeted sites, but there just aren’t enough divers to cover all the COTS hotspots across the Great Barrier Reef,” Dr. Matthew Dunbabin of the QUT’s Institute for Future Environments said in a statement.
Dunbabin, who created the COTSbot with postdoctoral research fellow Feras Dayoub, said that he sees it as “a first responder for ongoing eradication programs – deployed to eliminate the bulk of COTS in any area, with divers following a few days later to hit the remaining COTS.”
Autonomous robot to begin its hunt this December
The COTSbot, which is said to resemble a tiny sub, is equipped with stereoscopic cameras that give it depth perception, five thrusters to maintain stability, a GPS unit and pitch-and-roll sensors – not to mention the injection arm that will deliver the fatal doses of bile salts to the starfish.
Over the past week, it successfully completed its first sea-based tests of its mechanical parts and navigation system, the developers said. COTSbot was designed to search the reef for up to eight hours at a time completely autonomously and deliver more than 200 injections. By using machine learning, it has been trained to recognize the starfish over the past six months.
“Its computer system is backed by some serious computational power so COTSbot can think for itself in the water,” said Dayoub, a member of the QUT Science and Engineering Faculty. “If the robot is unsure that something is actually a COTS, it takes a photo of the object to be later verified by a human, and that human feedback is incorporated into the robot’s memory bank.”
“We’ve now trained the robot using thousands of images of COTS collected on the reef and the system is proving itself incredibly robust at detecting the COTS,” the researcher added. “That in itself is quite an accomplishment given the complexity of underwater environments, which are subject to varying visibility as well as depth-dependent color changes.”
COTSbot is believed to be the first autonomous underwater vehicle to come equipped with an injection system, and they said that it was designed to operate exclusively within one meter of the seafloor. It will begin policing the reef autonomously in December, the roboticists added.
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Image credit: Queensland University of Technology/NBC News
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