The Starfish Terminator The American Society of Mechanical Engineers, October 2018 Product: Underwater Animal Capturing Robot Environmental Impact: Reduces the number of Crown-Of-Thorn Starfish in the Great Barrier Reef Planetary Boundary: Biodiversity Loss Keywords: Marine disasters, Coral reef, Crown-of-thrones starfish, Biodiversity loss, Marine Robotics, Autonomous underwater vehicle, Responsive solution Description: COTS is instead an autonomous underwater robot equipped with artificial intelligence software, built by Matthew Dunbabin and Feras Dayoub, who study and build autonomous systems at the Institute for Future Environments at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. Dunbabin and Dayoub built it to help fight one of the biggest marine disasters in progress—an outbreak of crown-of-thorns starfish, the voracious coral-eating organisms that are decimating the Great Barrier Reef faster than it can rebuild itself.