Project summary

GhostNet Hunting is an open-architecture system that detects and removes abandoned or discarded fishing nets in shallow coastal waters. Submerged nets act as kill traps for marine life, especially sea turtles and fish.

Low-power edge computer vision, autonomous shallow-water robotic boats, and long-range communication will replace dangerous, unassisted volunteer dive surveys with automated spatial risk intelligence.

What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?

Pinpoint submerged ghost nets before they trap and drown marine wildlife, specifically endangered sea turtles.

Remove the need for volunteer divers to conduct hazardous, unassisted visual searches in turbid, high-drag coastal waters.

Create an open-hardware platform that non-profit conservation teams can build, operate, and maintain without relying on expensive oceanic survey vessels or paid cloud services.

How will you know it worked?

Deploy lightweight, tethered or untethered micro-submersibles/surface rovers programmed with energy-aware path planning to systematically map coastal shallows, reefs, and rocky perimeters.

Run lightweight detection models directly on low-power onboard microcontrollers (edge AI) to identify net textures, rope geometry, and submerged floats in real time, overcoming turbid waters without cloud dependency.

Utilise low-frequency acoustic and long-range radio (LPWAN/LoRa) communications to relay verified GPS coordinates and depth profiles of detected hazards directly to shore stations or dive team vessels.

Feed actionable location data directly into local conservation dive teams and marine protection authorities for surgical, coordinated retrieval.

How will this funding be used?

We will purchase and install the cameras, and purchase and use robots, mini ships and rovers for the mission. We will also use battery-powered charging and power stations to meet the power and energy requirements. We will also publish a monthly progress report and try to advertise on social media to raise public awareness. We will also organise awareness events.

Who is on your team? What's your track record on similar projects?

I am an academic living in Northern Cyprus for the past 4 years. I am going to kick-start it with my student volunteers and then will establish a team once funded. We have been doing projects in the same line and need funding to develop and deploy them in the hatchling nests.

Reference (Muhammad Toaha Raza Khan)

What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails?

The project is timely and has great potential to perform very well and to serve the cause as well. The government and the community are also aware of and support such initiatives. It is very practical, and we have done similar prototyping in past.

How much money have you raised in the last 12 months, and from where?

For this Human Override project, I have raised $0 so far.

During the last 12 months, I secured two AdımODTÜ undergraduate research projects as project supervisor. Their total value is TRY 120,000, with one project funded at TRY 70,000 and the other at TRY 50,000. These are small university-supported undergraduate research projects and are unrelated to the Human Override proposal.

Before that, I worked on several larger funded research projects, including an International Science Partnerships Fund project on post-earthquake communication resilience, a project on AI resource allocation in mobile V2X communications, and research supported through Korean NRF and BK21 programs.

Those earlier grants are outside the last 12-month period and are not being used to fund this project