COTSbot – QUT’s smart underwater killer robot
Drs Matt Dunbabin and Feras Dayoub with the COTSbot robot which is designed to search for and kill Crown of Thorns Starfish.
Photo:QUT Marketing and Communication/Erika Fish.
PH: 0731385003.
A robot whose only job is to hunt and kill a specific target sounds like the plot for a Terminator movie and you can almost see Arnie delivering the iconic one liner, ‘I’ll be back’. However, scientists at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) have created such a machine – and it also has the ability to ‘learn’.
In an effort to control the population of Crown-of-Thorns Starfish (COTS) on the Great Barrier Reef, Drs Mathew Dunbabin and Feras Dayoub have developed a robot with the specific objective to hunt and inject lethal doses of sodium bisulphate solution (bile salts) into the starfish. However, it also has the ability to learn from its experiences.
The intelligent robot, obviously named Crown-of-Thorns Starfish robot (COTSbot), is an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) that is designed to operate, without any tethering, for up to 8 hours at a time. It has the ability to identify its target and deliver its lethal payload.
QUT News says the robot is equipped with stereoscopic cameras, thrusters, GPS, pitch-and-roll sensors and a unique pneumatic injection arm.
Dr Dunbabin, from the university’s Institute of Future Environments, said his creation would help human divers in their efforts to control the starfish’s population in hotspot areas. He said in a statement:
“Human divers are doing an incredible job of eradicating this starfish from targeted sites but there just aren’t enough divers to cover all the COTS hotspots across the Barrier Reef.”
He said the robot can be seen as a first responder in the eradication program and will be able to cover a lot of ground in a fleet of 10 – 100, day or night, and in any kind of weather.
Concept drawing of the COTSbot.
Photo: QUT News
The autonomous robot is able to do this thanks to state of the art computer vision and machine learning system enabling roboticists to ‘train’ the robot to recognize its target among the coral.
The idea for the robot was developed by Dr Dunbabin a decade ago, but the eradication method at the time was a complex procedure which used more than one injection to kill starfish, limiting the use of a bot. However, a one injection method developed by James Cook University (JCU) last year enabled it to become a reality.
The detecting software was designed by Dr Dayoub, from QUT’s Science and Engineering Faculty and Australian Centre for Robotic Vision, said it would continue to learn from its experience in the field, and if it is unsure of anything it will take a picture to be verified later by a human. The development comes as welcome news for protectors of the reef. He said:
“Its computer system is backed by some serious computational power so COTSbot can think for itself underwater.”
“If the robot is unsure that something is actually a COTS, then it takes a photo of the object to be later verified by a human, and the human feedback is incorporated into the robot’s memory bank.”
The robot will be trialed later this month on the Great Barrier Reef and depending on its performance, could be fully operational and deployed on the reefs as early as December.
If successful, the COTSbot will prove to be an invaluable tool in the culling of the corallivores starfish whose only predators include the giant triton snail, the stars and stripes pufferfish, the titan triggerfish and the humphead maori wrasse.
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