AI jellyfish killing machines could sting pest surge

An underwater robot has been built to seek out and kill soaring numbers of jellyfish.

The species' population figures are increasing at a rapid rate in some parts of the world, including Japan and with sightings in British waters becoming more common, which poses a risk to the fishing industry as they get caught in nets and spoil catches. Engineers have built a three-foot-long, autonomous prototype and tested it in a lab, finding it to be highly efficient at seeking and destroying jellyfish.

Future experiments will deploy it in the wild to see if it is able to locate and exterminate live populations.

A team of researchers from Hiroshima Institute of Technology set out to create a “jellyfish extermination device” that would “suck and crush” them before ejecting the fragments back into the ocean.

“In this experiment, a jellyfish extermination device was mounted on (an) autonomous underwater vehicle, and a crushing experiment was conducted using a jellyfish sample, which is made of water and gelatin,” the researchers wrote in the Journal of Japan Society for Design Engineering. “It was confirmed that a jellyfish sample with a diameter of about seven cm and a height of about 11 cm could be crushed to small pieces ... during less than about eight seconds.”

The theory is that a robot can be carried by ships and deployed in the water, where on-board ultrasonic sensors and AI technology can identify a jellyfish target, then a large hose would suck the creature into the vehicle and jets of pressurized water and a turbine shred it into pieces.

Engineers are confident a version of the robot will be used in the oceans by 2024.

Fisheries estimate jellyfish cost the Japanese industry more than $95 million a year.