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| CSIRO | SOLVE | Issue 10 | FEB 07 | |
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ARTICLE
ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT:
Starbug the Seeing Submarine By Jason Major
An autonomous twin-hulled robot submarine is set to map and monitor the habitats of the Great Barrier Reef.Plans are under way for numerous small robotic submarines to map and monitor the habitats of the Great Barrier Reef and other marine ecosystems, helping scientists and industry better understand and manage such environments.
Called Starbug, the robot submarine is an autonomous, twin-hulled vessel that can do its job unsupervised or tethered to a vessel. On completing its mission it can be packed into a suitcase and carried to its next assignment. It is said to be the first truly affordable Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) that will cut the cost of collecting data for environmental monitoring and management in coastal and reef environments. Because many of Starbug’s onboard technologies are transferrable to other platforms, it has also caught the attention of the fisheries, defence and petroleum industries. CSIRO’s marine scientists and robotics engineers collaborated on Starbug’s design, which won the Innovation Award at the Institute of Engineers Queensland Engineering Excellence Awards and the Australian Engineering Excellence Award. Starbug’s initial testing ground will be in environmental monitoring, but CSIRO Petroleum Research is also working with the Starbug team to expand its capabilities for inspection and intervention tasks on offshore facilities. “With more robotics technologies, the petroleum industry could reduce the cost of offshore inspection and maintenance,” says Matthew Dunbabin, robotics engineer with the CSIRO Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Centre. Port security and defence industries are also interested. “Low-cost technologies will allow routine inspection of ships and marine infrastructure,” he says. Although industries around the world already use AUVs, existing vehicles carry expensive sensors and are often large, requiring ships to transport and launch them. Many have to be tethered to a ship, and have difficulty navigating in obstacle-laden environments such as coral reefs, city harbours and some fisheries. Starbug, however, has been developed specifically to operate in such environments, and is one of the few AUVs to have vision as its primary navigation sensor. It can be used in shallow water (less than 100 metres), is extremely manoeuvrable and can carry a range of other sensors such as for temperature, depth, salinity and turbidity. “Vision systems are inexpensive, but they are information-rich and you can get a lot of important data from an image if it is processed correctly,” Mr Dunbabin says. “Vision also allows habitat mapping by recording the topography of the sea floor, and identifying and counting marine species. Starbug does what a diver can do, but for longer and deeper. It will do the quantitative work, freeing up marine scientists to do the finer qualitative work.“ A long-term goal is to use Starbug to control marine pest species such as the Crown of Thorns starfish. Preliminary testing of CSIRO’s recognition software indicates it could monitor population changes and help researchers design management strategies. “There is potential for Starbug to control starfish numbers by adding a small robotic arm to its frame to physically collect or inject the animals,” Mr Dunbabin says. Having been tested in the clear waters of the Great Barrier Reef, Starbug will now be trialled in Tasmania’s Derwent River. For further information contact: |
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