If you have ever been stung by a jellyfish before, you must know how painful it can be. A group of South Korean civil and environmental engineers knows how much of a strain jellyfish can be for the underwater ecosystems too. This is why they are building a robot that can hunt thousands of jellyfish per day.
The Jellyfish Elimination Robotic Swarm (JEROS) was developed at the South Korean research university KAIST. KAIST associate robotics professor Myung Hyun started working on the unmanned jellyfish removal system 3 years ago as they were not happy with the jellyfish attacks on the southwest coast of the country. Jellyfish also target fish by eating fish eggs and plankton that fish depend on.
The JEROS robot can float on the water’s surface and use a GPS system and camera for finding jellyfish swarms. Propulsion motors that are attached to the motor help the robot determine the best path to go after them with. The robot uses submerged nets to guide the jellyfish up to the robot and then a propeller is used to shred them up. KAIST engineers reported that in the first swarm, they were able to kill off around 900 pounds of jellyfish per hour. The new version of the robot can kill off around 2,000 pounds.
[Source: Discovery.com]
