TECH

Stork robot will deliver coral babies

Robotic Stork
Australian engineers have turned a submarine robot, used for environmental observations, into a robotic coral sower.RangerBot, now renamed LarvalBot, is poised to become a robotic stork for hundreds of millions of baby corals in a special delivery that coincides with annual spawning on the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia.The spectacular synchronized reproduction of corals is a highlight in the calendar of scientists around the world and is due to occur in late November. Hundreds of millions of these larvae will be collected and grown in large floating vessels in the region itself.Once developed - about 5 to 7 days later - the tiny coral larvae will be distributed by the robots on target reefs.Cultivated larvae will also be distributed as "larva clouds" in areas of damaged reefs, in an attempt to restore them."Our goal is to have two or three robots ready for November spawning, one of which will carry around 200,000 larvae and the other about 1.2 million, during the operation, the robots will follow pre-selected paths at constant altitude along the reef and a person will trigger release of the larvae to maximize dispersal efficiency, "said Professor Matthew Dunbabin of Queensland University of Technology.Each robot must disperse the larvae covering an area of ​​1,500 m2 per hour."This has the potential to revolutionize reef restoration around the world," said Peter Harrison, a member of the team. "We concentrated the larvae and put some of them in LarvalBot so that they gently squeeze the larvae in areas of dead reefs, allowing them to establish themselves into coral polyps, or baby corals."


Queensland Technology University.