This work presents a novel vision-based underwater robotic system for the identification and control of Crown-Of-Thorns starfish (COTS) in coral reef environments. COTS have been identified as one of the most significant threats to Australia's Great Barrier Reef. These starfish literally eat coral, impacting large areas of reef and the marine ecosystem that depends on it. Evidence has suggested that land-based nutrient runoff has accelerated recent outbreaks of COTS requiring extensive use of divers to manually inject biological agents into the starfish in an attempt to control population numbers. Facilitating this control program using robotics is the goal of our research.

For information on robotics related research at the Queensland University of Technology please visit the following links.
link to the project page: https://wiki.qut.edu.au/display/cyphy...
robotics@QUT home page (https://wiki.qut.edu.au/display/cyphy...).
robotics@QUT YouTube site (https://www.youtube.com/user/robotics...).
Australian Centre for Robotic Vision (http://roboticvision.org/).
International RobotX Maritime Challenge team site (