Coral-Repairing Robots Take a Step Closer To Reality 39
Zothecula writes "Since humans are responsible for much of the damage to coral reefs, it makes sense that we should try and help repair them. That's exactly what a team from the Herriot-Watt University's Centre for Marine Biodiversity and Biotechnology is attempting to do with the development of underwater "coralbots." Now anyone can add their support to this worthy effort with the launch of a Kickstarter campaign that will help make the robots a reality."
Resilient (Score:5, Interesting)
Coral reefs mostly bleach because of cooling and warming - the causes of which are natural changes in ocean circulation. The reefs are also much more resilient than we thought:
New research shows that an isolated reef off the northwest coast of Australia that was severely damaged by a period of warming in 1998 has regenerated in a very short time to become nearly as healthy as it was before. What surprises scientists, though, is that the reef regenerated by itself, found a study published Thursday in the journal Science
http://science.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/04/04/17603478-isolated-coral-reef-surprises-scientists-by-healing-itself?lite [nbcnews.com]
Neat! Good luck to them, seems unrealistic (Score:5, Interesting)
Having spent the better part of four years developing robots to do autonomous tasks which were like this in a lot of ways (check out http://www.robosub.org for the AUVSI foundations' robotics competition), I have to say the timelines, budget, and functionality they're aiming for seem pretty unrealistic.
They also seem to be pretty light on the details! The robot they presented looks like it's positively buoyant with passive roll control based on having the top have floats, and needs active depth control. This is fine for extremely short missions, but the robot I worked on with a nearly neutrally buoyant setup (it floated up ~1 foot per minute) still only had a runtime of about 6 hours, 3 hours if it was trying to do useful work (drive around, image recognician, etc). Admittedly our robot used a lot more sensors and had a 6-thruster system, but still, that was running on 26Amp-hours at 28V nominal, and I can hardly imagine that the robots they're planning on building in "swarm quantities" will have that kind of punch so the run times will likely be similar. And getting a bunch of robots to collectively do useful work in under 3 hours seems unlikely.
How are their swarms intercommunicating? RF is extremely limited in distance underwater (you can dump in more power to get it to go futher, but this reduces the runtime), acoustic coupling has almost no throughput and doesn't work well in swarms (interference gets bad fast), and shooting blue-green lasers requires knowledge of where you're shooting (so not terribly useful in a swarm context). Flashing bright lights would also be stupidly low bandwidth as well as energy intensive. And all of these solutions have the terrible downside that they're pretty instrusive when put right next to sea creatures of almost any type.
How are they planning on grabbing "easily broken-off" pieces of coral? Visual? That requires massive amounts of processing power to get right, and also brilliant coders, but even the best and brightest in the industry are still throwing computing clusters in the back of trucks at problems like this. Mixing the unpredictability of visual identification with the idea of great big swarms of robots also seems likely to be disasterous. And speaking from YEAAARS of experience, caustics ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caustic_%28optics%29 ) along with shifting light due to things like cloud cover will quickly destroy any and all notion of "normalcy" in your input data. We ran in a great big neutral buoyancy tank and we were friggin' great at identifying everything, the moment the sun and coulds and wind got involved we had about 10,000,000 recovery states which would try to "confirm" input, and frequently gave up before they crossed a threshold of certainty.
What are their plans to prevent their swarms from smashing the coral? What happens when one robot gets snagged? Or if they're working at depth and their glass sphere cracks and it catastrophically implodes, destroying a bunch of coral?
Don't get me wrong, I think it's a great research project for some phd student to talk very highly about, but the idea of dumping in money to the effort seems foolish without any real concrete details on the process. Some of them they could hand-wave ("we have a great vision guy!" "the final version will use a ballast!"), but I would want to see up-front descriptions of everything else. Kickstarter is something where I expect you to have finished the "research" and to be ready to "develop". You may make mistakes which provoke more research, but I want a plan, not a hope!
Research in to warmth resistant coral (Score:5, Interesting)
It bleaches because it kicks the algae out that give it it's color
It kicks out the algae because they are producing to much food for the polyps to survive.
The algae produce to much food because the water temperature rises.
Now that seems to me to be a chain of events we can influence a couple of different things in:
We could breed polyps that don't kick all the algae out, just enough to lower the food influx to a reasonable level.
We could breed algae to stabilize their production, despite of heat.
We could breed polyps that survive a higher food input.
Keeping the water cool may be the best long term solution, but it isn't the only one and it may be to long term. The water temperature will probably keep rising for years, even if we stop all sources for the rise now (which we can't realistically).