Autonomous killer drones begin patrolling the Great Barrier Reef

cnet ^

[BenLurkin]

The starfish feeds on native coral that call the reef home -- and they are key to the reef's ecology. No coral, no reef and so the starfish must be destroyed.

In 2015, researchers at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) unveiled the technology known as the Crown-Of-Thorns Starfish robot (COTSbot) to deal with the threat. When deployed, the autonomous robot was able to seek out crown-of-thorns starfish (with 99 percent accuracy) and inject them with a chemical cocktail that causes them to break out in nasty blisters and eventually die.

Now, that same research team has unveiled RangerBot, the latest iteration on that idea. The yellow underwater drone looks kind of like a tiny fluorescent whale shark with thrusters instead of fins. It has been called a "Swiss army knife" because along with controlling the starfish populations, it can monitor the reef for health indicators and map underwater areas, working for up to eight hours each day.

Compared with human divers performing the same task, the RangerBot is cheaper, more efficient and able to operate at all hours of the day and night.

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"We also spent a lot of time getting the user interface as simple to use as possible so that as many of our stakeholders (from researchers, management authorities and school children) could potentially operate it with a small amount of training."

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

If the reef dies it will take a great mnay other species with it. The starfish will simply move along to the next reef.