Coral reefs are diverse underwater ecosystems held together by calcium carbonate structures secreted by coral. Often referred to as the “rainforests of the sea,” they are said to provide a home for at least 25% of all marine species including fish, mollusks, worms, crustaceans, echinoderms, sponges, tunicates and other cnidarians. They also deliver ecosystem services to tourism, fisheries and shoreline protection. The annual global economic value of coral reefs is estimated between $29.8-375 billion.
But all these benefits of coral reefs come with a challenge: human activity, climate change and some species in the sea pose a great danger to their survival. One such species in the sea that poses immediate threat to the reefs is the crown-of-thorns sea starfish, scientifically known as Acanthaster planci. It eats the reefs in such a way that marine experts have said immediate measures must be put in place to save the reefs from extinction.
In an attempt to save the coral reefs from extinction, researchers at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia have built new robots that inject poison into Acanthaster planci, killing it to help preserve the reefs from its attacks. The researchers spent more than ten years developing this effective solution to save the rainforest of the sea.
Before this technological breakthrough, humans had to go under the sea and look for the Acanthaster planci and inject it with a poison to kill it. That was a difficult task and it wasted time and resources. It is said divers can only manage to kill about 120 Acanthaster planci per hour with poison, and even this puts the reefs and other species in danger as a result of human contact and the chemicals being used for the operation.
But the robot known as COTSBot, built by Matthew Dunbabin and Peter Corke, is a one-shot poison distributor which is harmless to everything else on the reef. It makes autonomous robotic control possible. The robot can efficiently target individual Acanthaster planci without having to try and keep track of which ones it has injected already, so it can go back and repeat the process nine more times like humans do. It is fast and effective.
COTSBot is a 30 kilogram yellow torpedo with a maximum speed of over 2 meters per second and an endurance of over 6 hours. Five thrusters give it the capability of briefly hovering in the water column, giving it time to attack the Acanthaster planci with an integrated poison injection system. It is completely autonomous, down to the identification and targeting of Acanthaster planci lurking among the reefs.
Previous research on image-based Acanthaster planci detection has increasingly improved the detection accuracy of the system and its ability to run on-board, modern, lower-power computers which can be installed within the space and power constraints of the underwater robot.
Therefore, the COTSBot system is a significant further advancement that exploits state-of-the-art techniques in machine learning to achieve a detection performance of well over 99%, while being able to operate in real-time, on-board the AUV.
However, the developers have said they do not expected that the COTSBot will be able to detect every single Acanthaster planci on a reef.
A small fleet of COTSBots can deal with the majority of Acanthaster planci over the course of days or weeks. Divers can then deal with the rest and this will help to keep the coral reefs population under control to continue to serve both human and marine population.
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