A major problem facing the Great Barrier Reef, and coral reefs in general, is the crown-of-thorns starfish. Outbreaks of the critters, which feed on coral, have been a consistent problem over the past several decades, and it's a huge pain to get rid of them manually.

Enter COTSbot (​Crown-​Of-​Thorns Starfish robot), a robot submarine that automates the process.

Previously, human divers would go around injecting the pesky sea stars with poison up to 10 times a year just keep their populations in check. That painstaking process also included documenting and tracking which ones had already been injected. That made it an even bigger challenge to automate the process: How do you get a robot to know which has been tagged already, and which have not?

But a new agent released last year requires only a single injection to kill the target—no more coming back to hit the same starfish time and time again. This innovation led a group of researchers at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia to revisit the robot idea and produce the proof-of-concept COTSbot.

The bot, which closely resembles a yellow torpedo, autonomously swims about hunting for crown-of-thorns starfishes, processing what it's seeing on-board before injecting them with the potent toxin. How good is it at recognizing the hazardous critters? According to the team's documentation, it has "a detection performance of well over 99% whilst being able to operate real-time on-board the AUV​​." So, pretty good.

Given that the bot can run around for about six hours at a time, that's a whole bunch of dead starfish.

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Is that an injection or a Love Machine. ?