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Scientists hoping to preserve coral reefs have developed an autonomous submarine to help control populations of crown-of-thorns sea stars. The sea stars devour coral at alarming rates, and are surprisingly hardy. Missing limbs simply regrow after being removed, so scuba divers have had to resort to injecting the starfish with poison up to 10 times each.
The autonomous robot can stay underwater for up to six hours, and uses a new poison that requires only one injection. The robot identifies the sea stars using a sophisticated image processing algorithm. The new poison is allegedly harmless to other sea creatures.
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Scientists Develop Killer Robots That Inject Poison Into Coral Munching Starfish
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ANN JILLIAN'S HAIR makes LONI ANDERSON'S HAIR look like RICARDO
MONTALBAN'S HAIR!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 09 2015, @07:10AM
> The cited articles are careful to never mention a price, or how many people it takes to maintain, launch and recover these robots.
Conspiracies under every rock. It was created at a university. They probably don't have a pricetag because it was research work, not product development. And operational costs are certainly shoe-string budget level because the people who do this sort of work of protecting reefs aren't in it for the money. The only benefit they get out of it is that their jobs are pretty mellow, hanging out on the water most of the day.