The Crown of Thorns Starfish robot (COTSbot) developed by the Queensland University of Technology will kill the crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS), the corrosive species responsible for destroying about 50% of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, Discovery News reports.
HOW IT DETECTS THE PREY
In an interview with the BBC, COTSbot researcher Matthew Dunbabin explained how the robot operates, and how it detects starfish. “The core of the detection is a state-of-the-art computer vision and machine learning system,” Dunbabin said. “This system has been trained to recognise COTS (crown-of-thorns starfish) from among a vast range of corals using thousands of still images of the reef and videos taken by COTS-eradicating divers.”
MECHANICAL HITMAN
Using its vision system, the robot finds starfish and kills them with a pneumatic injection. One of the chief tasks of programming the robot was giving it the ability to identify COTS as separate from other sea life and strike it accordingly. During a single session at sea, the COTSbot can give out 200 of the poisonous injections.
Its starfish-killing capability has led the AAU to call it a “mechanical hitman”. In an interview with the Australian news agency, Dunbabin said “It will never out-compete a human diver in terms of sheer numbers of injections but it will be more persistent”.
WHY THE ROBOT WAS MADE
Overpopulation by any species can have negative effects on any ecosystem, and an explosion in the starfish population led to the species eating away at the Great Barrier Reef. And as the COTSbot’s university website says, the movement of nutrients to sea from land in the area since the 1960s has “accelerated outbreaks of COTS” to the detriment of the reef.
According to Popular Science, Dunbabin began work on COTSbot ten years ago. Back then, however, the best usable poison known to them required 20 injections to kill a single starfish. Since then, they’ve discovered that using bile (which the robot currently uses) injections is a much more efficient method of killing them.
CHECK OUT THE ROBOT IN ACTION
You can watch COTSbot in action in this cool video that Dr. Feyas Dayoub, a research fellow at the Queensland University of Technology, posted to YouTube.
