This Robot Will Hunt Lionfish to Save Coral Reefs
This Robot Will Hunt Lionfish to Save Coral Reefs
The invasive species might soon meets its mechanical
match.
By David Grossman Aug 27, 2018
Usually animal preservation is a passive effort, creating
protected zones or taking other measures to protect plants and animals from
humans. But scientists and students at the Polytechnic Institute in
Massachusetts want to help protect coral reefs from an invasive species in a
more aggressive fashion: They're building a robot designed to autonomously hunt
for and harvest lionfish threatening coral reefs.
Lionfish have threatened coral reefs off American and
Caribbean coasts for years. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
describes them as "flexible predators potentially capable of reducing the
abundance of a wide variety of native reef-associated fishes."
Native to the Indo-Pacific and Middle East, lionfish have
distinctive features which make them prized aquarium pets. After likely being
dumped into the Atlantic by owners who no longer value them, their eggs have
the Gulf Stream southbound to allowing them to become vicious predators amidst
shrimp, small crabs, Nassau grouper and yellowtail snapper, just to name a few
species who have come under attack.
Their style of attack is unique to their newfound waters.
Lionfish have hollow bones in their dorsal and pectoral fins which they inject
with toxins. Whipping their fins towards a target, NOAA estimates that they've
created a diet of around 40 species.
That's where the robots come in.
“The goal is to be able to toss the robot over the side
of a boat and have it go down to the reef, plot out a course, and begin its
search,” says Craig Putnam, a senior instructor in computer science at WPI, in
a press statement. “It needs to set up a search pattern and fly along the reef,
and not run into it, while looking for the lionfish. The idea is that the
robots could be part of the environmental solution.”
A fish-hunting robot has many complex requirements. When
designing a robot to hunt one specific fish, getting the identification process
right is crucial. The robotic hunter needs to be able to distinguish lionfish
from other fish within the reef ecosystem to choose the right target. Ideally,
coral reefs are busy and flourishing environments full of sight and sound. The
robot needs to cut down a tremendous amount of noise to find its target.
That training comes from machine learning. The students
at WPI showed their robot thousands of pictures of lionfish of different
colors, taken from different angles and with varying lighting conditions,
training it to recognize a lionfish with greater than 95 percent accuracy. The
robot also got pictures of human divers in order to train it in what not to
absolutely avoid shooting.
The robot will use a revolving carousel that WPI compares
to the cylinder of a revolver, it will hold eight detachable spear tips. A
motorized mechanism will thrust the spear's tip into the fish body. When this
mechanized shaft retracts, it will leave the spear tip within the fish's body
and the carousel will move on.
When operating with mechanized attack systems like this,
buoyancy suffers. The WPI students working on the robot as a Major Qualifying
Project (MQP) decided to compensate for this through a watertight, air-filled
chamber that enlarges slightly after each spearing.
And all of this needed to be done in salt water. “In many
ways, this was the hardest part of the project,” says William Godsey, a student
who worked on the system’s buoyancy and electronics chambers, along with its
shooting mechanism. “Just because something is waterproof doesn’t mean it will
work in salt water, which is an incredibly corrosive substance.”
Up next for the robot during the 2018-19 academic year, a
second MQP team will focus on the robot’s global navigation system. The hope is
that in addition to reducing the lionfish threat to reefs, the robots could
provide a source of income for fisherman who would sell the lionfish to local
restaurants.
Coral reefs need all the help they can get. Rising water
temperatures have proven to be a major threat to the Great Barrier Reef in
Australia among others. Some scientists believe that using CRISPR technology to
genetically edit coral could be the best hope for saving reefs in the future.
But robotic legionnaires might also help.
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