A team of scientists that designed a robot tasked with seeking and putting down harmful starfish are close to releasing their creation into the ocean.
According to BBC News, the robot is designed to hunt crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) in order to prick them with a lethal injection. Appropriately named the COTSbot, the robot is autonomous and has an image recognition system on-board.
Matthew Dunbabin, the Queensland University of Technology's (QUT') Institute for Future Environments, created the COTSbot and told BBC News it will explore the Moreton Bay in Brisbane to better its GPS system. Eventually, the researchers will set the robot out in the Great Barrier Reef.
"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," Dunbabin said in a news release. "We see the COTSbot 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.
"The COTSbot becomes a real force multiplier for the eradication process the more of them you deploy - imagine how much ground the programs could cover with a fleet of 10 or 100 COTSbots at their disposal, robots that can work day and night and in any weather condition."
The COTS are considered harmful for coral, which are already adversely affected by other factors, like climate change.
"The core of the detection is a state-of-the-art computer vision and machine learning system," Dunbabin told BBC News. "This system has been trained to recognize 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."
