SYDNEY: Crown-of-thorns starfish are one of the greatest threats to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, and a team of researchers have a robot that’s going to fight back.
The starfish species, which is native to the Indo-Pacific region, feeds on coral and a serious outbreak can have a devastating impact on reef health. Some estimates suggest the organism has accounted for a 40% decline in coral cover in the World Heritage-listed site.
The anti-crown-of-thorns starfish robot, or COTSbot, was developed by Matthew Dunbabin and Feras Dayoub of the Queensland University of Technology.
Dunbabin, a robotics expert, said he had been thinking about the project for many years, but was held back by the available methods of eradicating the starfish.
Previously, human divers needed to inject every tentacle of the starfish to kill it, he explained, but last year, James Cook University came up with a single shot injection system. “From a robotics perspective, it became a lot better for us. We could start to consider it a robotics problem.”
The COTSbot comes equipped with a pneumatic injection arm that will deliver a fatal dose of bile salts to the crown-of-thorns starfish.
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