Killer Robots may be the trope of science fiction stories and movies and there are legitimate concerns that a superhuman artificial intelligence or ‘singularity’ might be a danger in the future but today we can use them to do our bidding to help protect coral reefs. The crown of thorns starfish,Acanthaster planci, is large species of starfish covered in sharp venomous spines with a voracious appetite for the reef building stony corals that are a keystone species of coral reefs, and one of the most celebrated groups of aquarium corals.
Normally the predation of the crown of thorns starfish would be a good thing on the reef, clearing fresh space for new corals and reef species to colonize and helping to maintain a high species diversity in these important ecosystems. However with all of the dangers corals reefs currently face, not the least of which is global climate change, coral bleaching and coal diseases, large outbreaks of COTS can wreak havoc on the reef as they consume huge swaths of living stony corals.
There has been a lot of research into understanding ways to keep the COTS numbers in check but until now even the most successful efforts have relied on individual people to actively seek outAcanthaster plancion the reef in order to inject them with starfish-killing bile, one at a time. This manual approach to controlling COTS populations is as tedious as it sounds but with the rise of many new technologies including autonomous underwater vehicles (UAVs) and computer vision, engineers have designed and built a new starfish killing robot called COTSBOT.
Cotsbot是一种精致的无人机，可以自主识别刺海星的冠冕，并将其注入胆汁，而Cotsbot的指导系统显然是如此有效，甚至会忽略刺刺海星的冠状冠冠的3D印刷模型！第一个Cotsbot已经成为一台名为Rangerbot的新机器，该机器是从头开始建造的，因为这项非常重要的任务要较小，更有效，更便宜，因此可以建造和部署其中许多以保护珊瑚礁，以保护珊瑚礁免受此影响。破坏性的棘皮动物。
Rangerbotcan also operate at night when COTS are feeding most actively but it can also be outfitted to help disperse lab-cultured coral larvae which are ready to settle out on the reef making Rangerbot both a killer of starfish, and protector of the next generation of reef building corals. The bots can operate for up to 8 hours on a charge in shark and crocodile infested waters and with the cost of the newest models costing approximately $15,000 a piece we may someday have swarms of these versatile machines doing their part to give coral reefs a fighting chance against the dreaded crown of thorns starfish. [Rangerbot]
