An autonomous (selvstyrende) starfish-killing robot is close to being ready for trials on the Great Barrier Reef, researchers say, according to BBC online Wednesday.
Since the 1960s, the movement of nutrients from the land into the sea has meant that starfish numbers are growing and destroying large areas of reef corals, the researchers said.
The Cotsbot robot, which has a vision system, is designed to seek out starfish and give them a lethal injection.
After it eradicates the bulk of starfish in a given area, human divers can move in and mop up the survivors.
“Later this month we begin deploying the robot in the Great Barrier Reef to evaluate our state-of-the-art vision-based crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) detection system,” Queensland University of of Technology researcher Matthew Dunbabin told the BBC.
The technology has two key components – an image recognition system and the robot submersible (undervands).
“The core of the detection is a state-of-the-art computer vision and machine learning system,” Mr 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.”
Mere om verdens største koralrev – Great Barrier Reef – på
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Barrier_Reef
