Development and Experimental Testing of an Autonomous Jellyfish Detection and Removal Robot System

The development of an autonomous jellyfish removal robot system, named JEROS, and related experimental results are presented in this paper. The number of jellyfish has drastically increased due to changes to the marine environment. Large jellyfish swarms are threatening marine ecosystems and inducing enormous damage globally to marine-related industries. JEROS has been designed based on a twin hull-type surface vehicle equipped with a device for shredding jellyfish. Additionally, an electrical control system, a guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) system, and a vision-based jellyfish detection system are embedded to remove jellyfish autonomously. The jellyfish removal mission starts when the location of jellyfish is detected, followed by planning a path for jellyfish removal, tracking the path using an autonomous navigation system, and shredding jellyfish while tracking. The performance of the vision-based jellyfish detection, navigation, and jellyfish removal was demonstrated through experiments in a pond and field tests in Masan Bay located on the southern coast of South Korea.