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Drone deals DEATH – to deadly starfish

Great Barrier Reef boffins poisoning Crown of Thorns by remote control

An Australian university is about to start deploying drones on a seek-and-destroy mission. The target? The Crown of Thorns Starfish, which is famously a serious danger to the country's Great Barrier Reef.

The invading predator first emerged as a problem for the reef in the 1960s, and since then it's been blamed for coral cover in the reef falling from 50 per cent then to around 16 per cent now.

Enter COTSBot, an underwater starfish-killing drone that combines the visual systems and computing needed to autonomously identify the starfish, GPS for navigation, and a "one-shot" toxic injection to kill the starfish.

Its developer, Dr Matt Dunbabin of QUT, calls the robot a "force multiplier" in the fight against the pest, since while there are efforts to send divers to kill the critter, there aren't enough people to do the work.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports that the last phase in the ten-year project to get COTSBot operational – training it to distinguish the starfish from its surroundings – has been completed.

Lucky QUT researcher Dr Feras Dayoub had the job of "showing" the COTSBot "thousands" of images of the Crown of Thorns starfish using both film and 3D printed models over a period of six months.

The videos below, by Dr Dayoub, show different aspects of the COTSBot's detection at work.

Youtube Video

Youtube Video

The next stage of the project will be live-testing the deathbot – but with a human operator in charge to observe performance in the field. ®

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