Engineering news
An autonomous underwater vehicle has been developed by Queensland University of Technology (QUT) that can help stop the Great Barrier Reef’s crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS), a persistent pest for the reef that is currently deteriorating in health.
COTS are responsible for an estimated 40% of the Great Barrier Reef's total decline in coral cover. The reef has been given a poor health rating by the Australian government for a third year in a row.
QUT researchers have successfully completed field trials of the COTS robot that can navigate difficult reefs, detect COTS and deliver a fatal dose of bile salts, autonomously and precisely, said the university.
It’s the first robot in the world proven to control marine pests and the first ever built with an injection system, according to the researchers.
The COTS robot spent the trials tethered to a wifi-enabled boat beaming data back to the researchers, allowing the team to see through the robot’s cameras, verify every COTS it identified, and approve injections before they happened. Once it proved it could work well under human supervision, the researchers monitored its autonomous efforts.
Dr Dayoub, a research fellow at the QUT’s Australian Centre for Robotic Vision, said: “The robot’s detection rate is outstanding, particularly because COTS blend in very well with the hard corals they feed on, and because the robot must detect them in widely varying lighting conditions and shapes as they hide among the coral.
“When it comes to accurate detection, the goal is to avoid any false positives – that is, the robot mistaking another creature for a COTS. Our detection is extremely precise, it’s consistently reliable.”
The COTS robot is designed to support existing human-powered COTS control methods, sweeping an area for the majority of the pests and leaving the hard-to-reach starfish for the specialist divers who follow.
The researchers are already working with the Great Barrier Reef Foundation to transform the COTS robot into Ranger Bot, a multipurpose, multifunction robot for monitoring a wide range of issues facing coral reefs across the globe; coral bleaching, water quality, pest species, pollution and siltation included.