Development of a jellyfish reconnaissance and removal robot system using unmanned aerial and surface vehicles

Summary form only given. In this paper, a novel robot system for a jellyfish reconnaissance and removal using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and unmanned surface vehicle (USV) is introduced. In recent years, overpopulated jellyfish are threatening ocean ecosystem as well as damaging to ocean-related industries such as fishery, seaside power plants, and casualties. The damage is estimated about 300M USD per year in South Korea. To resolve this problem, a jellyfish removal net towed by trawl boats and a few of devices to prevent the influx of jellyfish have been developed. However, most of these devices have the limited usage due to environmental constraints. To solve this problem using a robotic system, the jellyfish removal robot system, named JEROS (Jellyfish Elimination RObotic Swarm), has been proposed [1]. The JEROS consists of a USV and a jellyfish remover device. The USV can perform a jellyfish removal task using an autonomous navigation system. The jellyfish remover device is originally designed to shred jellyfish. It is additionally designed using a conveyor device to remove venomous jellyfish without shredding. JEROS is extended to a swarm robot system to enhance the performance of jellyfish removal [2]. The swarm robot system performs the jellyfish removal task while maintaining a formation. The UAV-type jellyfish reconnaissance system is proposed. The UAV flies over the sea along a coverage path to search a swarm of jellyfish. A camera mounted on the UAV takes images of the sea surface and a jellyfish recognition algorithm based on a deep learning finds distribution of jellyfish using the taken images. The jellyfish removal task is performed by JEROS in combination with the reconnaissance system. The reconnaissance system recognizes the distribution of jellyfish and transmits the position of the distribution to the JEROS system. The JEROS system generates a path from a starting position to the received region and follows the path. On arriving, the JEROS system remove jellyfish using the jellyfish remover device while following a coverage path.