Multiple-armed starfish, Crown-of-thorns starfish, is among the greatest threats to Great Barrier Reef of Australia these days. To deal with the threat, researchers developed a robot, COTSbot. The robot is developed by Matthew Dunbabin and Feras Dayoub of the Queensland University of Technology.

Crown-of-thorns starfish is a species of starfish native to the Indo-Pacific region. The starfish depends on coral for its food, and can lead to an outbreak affecting reef health. As per some experts, the starfish species is responsible for 40% decline in coral in the World Heritage-listed site.

While providing details on the anti-crown-of-thorns starfish robot, one of its developers, Dunbabin, said the he was planning to develop such a robot from a long time, but the available methods of removing the starfish were de- motivating him. Previously, every starfish was injected by human divers, but earlier James Cook University invented 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", Dunbabin said. The new robot has a pneumatic injection arm that could help researchers delivering an effective dose of bile salts to the starfish, Dunbabin added.

The new robot looks similar to a mini-submarine, which uses the latest advances in machine learning. With the help of image recognition, the robot ensures that it is only targeting the starfish and not other species or coral. According to Dunbabin, the robot's vision system is autonomous, but in case of any doubts, it clicks picture of the unknown item and beams it back to the lab.