COTSBot is a small autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) 4.5 feet (1.4 m) long, which is designed by Queensland University of Technology (QUT) to kill the very destructive crown-of-thorns starfish (Acanthaster planci) in the Great Barrier Reef off the north-east coast of Australia.
It identifies its target using an image-analyzing neural net to analyze what an onboard camera sees, and then lethally injects the starfish with a bile salt solution using a needle on the end of a long underslung foldable arm.
After training COTSBot with machine learning, its accuracy rate rose to 99% by 2019.
[1] COTSBot is capable of killing 200 crown-of-thorns starfish with its two liters capacity of poison.
[1] A smaller version of COTSBot called "RangerBot" is also being developed by QUT.