Coral reefs are extremely beautiful to look at, but then again, they are also extremely sensitive to the kind of changes that they can experience through pollution, being decimated by careless tourists, as well as through other underwater lifeforms – such as starfish. Well, it looks like the starfish problem might have a solution in the form of the COTSbot robot.
The COTSbot robot will sport a vision system which has been specially designed to seek out starfish, and upon doing so, perform a lethal injection on those starfish. Once it has done its job of being the first responder to a particularly starfish infested area, human divers will then follow up that “genocide” by nicking off whatever survivors that there are behind.
So far, field trials of the COTSbot have kicked off in Moreton Bay in Brisbane, where the trials will hopefully be able to refine its navigation system. This robot will be deployed in the Great Barrier Reef in due time in order to evaluate our state-of-the-art vision-based crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) detection system. The COTSbot has been specially designed to autonomously search for crown-of-thorns starfish and destroy them, and the image recognition system and the robot submersible happen to be the key components of this unique robot.
Filed in . Read more about Science. Source: digitaljournal