Overpopulated jellyfish has been inflicting enormous damage to marine-related industries. In an effort to minimize this damage, some researchers have proposed jellyfish removal systems including jellyfish shredding or cutting device. However, the removal system with jellyfish shredding device has risks of secondary damages such as eutrophication and sting by fragments of jellyfish if they are venomous. To resolve these risks, a system that removes jellyfish without shredding jellyfish is needed. Thus, we propose a jellyfish removal robot system consisting of an unmanned surface vehicle (USV) and a conveyor device for jellyfish lifting that is attached underneath the USV. The conveyor device consists of an asymmetric funnel-shaped net for guiding jellyfish to the conveyor, a lattice-shaped conveyor belt, and a jellyfish storage. It is also designed to minimize the dimension of the conveyor belt and also minimize the drag force caused by water. The feasibility of the conveyor device was verified at Masan Bay in the Southern coast of South Korea.
Ref.: Donghoon Kim, Sungwook Jung, Hanguen Kim, Jae-Uk Shin, Taekjun Oh, and Hyun Myung, "Development of Conveyor-Type Jellyfish Removal Robot System for Venomous Jellyfish," in Proc. ICROS (Inst. of Control, Robotics, and Systems) Annual Conference, Daejeon, Korea, May 6-8, 2015. (In Press, In Korean)