Coralbots has won equipment cash from the UK government! We have a small part of a autonomous robotics equipment award shared between Heriot-Watt University (where most of us are) and Edinburgh University. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-23332184. This means we will be able to buy a dedicated coralbot for the project, but still need your donation to accelerate development and testing of the control software and much else!

We are deeply grateful to Jonathon Porritt for his endorsement of our project. Jonathon says:  “I really like this idea. The scale of damage to the world’s coral reefs is already so overwhelming that we will need an army of coralbots to get the restoration underway!” - Jonathon is a leading light in environmentalism; see his biography, affiliations and current activities here

Our Mission  Coral reefs support over 500 million people, and harbour vital reserves of biodiversity that are crucial to current and future medicine. But reefs are being damaged on a global scale by storms, destructive fishing, ship groundings, making them even more susceptible to stresses such as pollution and ocean acidification. It can take many years to decades for them to heal. Start to read more about the vital importance of coral reefs and their untempered decline here. 

Restoration attempts currently take place on shallow reefs using  scuba divers attaching healthy coral back onto the reef. For example, see below two pictures provided by our colleague Lisa Carne from her highly successful "Fragments of Hope" Coral Nursery in Belize. The fist shows a healthy coral ecosystem in the seas around Belize, and the other shows divers working on the restoration of a damaged reef nearby.  Local fishermen and tour guides with expertise are vital to this success story, but such approaches cannot be used to repair reefs in deeper waters below about 600 feet where reefs also exist because of depth limits to humans diving. 

Our answer: Coralbots - autonomous undersea robots that will repair and restore damaged coral reefs.  When fully developed, coralbots will manipulate pieces of healthy corals (either scattered from their original position due to damage, or provided by a coral nursery), find appropriate places for these pieces to go in the original reef (to maximise the chances of regeneration), and then attach the fragment to the reef. This needs lots of adaptation and refinement of 'computational intelligence' algorithms around machine vision and robot control. All our developed and deployed algorithms will be open source (see here ).  

The Coralbots idea is unique and transformative - current robotics applications in the marine world, as well as on land and sea, are almost entirely about surveillance, monitoring and exploration - basically, robots see and report back.  The potential for robots to make positive changes to the environment by manipulating it has not been considered until now. Apart from missions to restore coral reefs, a key motivation for our team is to inspire many further activities of this kind, which we believe will transform marine conservation forever. Small steps beyond our current plans, for example, will enable myriad other marine conservation missions, including different types of intervention in relation to coral reefs (e.g. inoculating the 'crown of thorns' starfish that has devastated the Great Barrier Reef), through to collection of marine litter that kills millions of marine animals and birds every year.  

Below is the coralbot we will most likely buy (with manipulator included) with the equipment money recently raised, along with 3 smaller sea-surface robots for navigation and communication.

State of the art research is starting to attach manipulators to such robots (e.g. to recover valuable archeological artefacts, or tighten valves in undersea installations). The coralbots team aim to exploit this developing technology in ways that revolutionize marine conservation, in missions that carefully manipulate aspects of the marine environment, accomplishing tasks that scuba divers currently attempt, but immensely more speedily, tirelesly, and  without danger to human lives. Coralbots will be based on existing understea robot vehicles, with manipulators attached. Below left, one view of a prototype coralbot, on the right: model of an existing up to date AUV (Nessie VII) with a manipulator arm attached.

What makes our longer term vision particularly exciting and effective is the idea of using swarm intelligence to control robot behaviour. Swarm intelligence explains how simple behaviours in a group of creatures can lead to complex and functional structures – this is how bees build hives, and termites build complex mounds, and beavers build dams. Read more about that here.  

Who are we? The core coralbots team are a group of scientists and engineers that have internationally leading expertise and immense experience in all of these things. Our areas are coral biology and regeneration (Lea-Anne Henry), autonomous underwater robots technology (David Lane and Dick Blidberg), artificial and swarm intelligence (David Corne), and video/image processing (Neil Robertson). Please see more about the core team and our extended team here.

What you get: in addition to the obvious environmental and knock-on rewards we will all get, we are keen to provide whatever additional rewards we can for our backers. You will get thank you cards and/or videos, you can get your name on a coralbot, you can adopt a coralbot, get a coralbots game, you can have your name forever on a restored reef and more. We are also excited by and committed to global engagement in this programme - that means, working with our backers and involving you in the project itself. You can be a Coralbots Developer, or you can provide IT Support, and your school can engage with us and get exclusive updates.  The way all this translates into the 'perks' we can make availablle is on the right of the campaign page, and also explained further here. 

What we need:  Recent success in other efforts from the team means we will soon be able to buy a new undersea robot, including a manipulator arm, dedicated to the project! We now need the funds to:

• develop and refine the necessary 'computational intelligence', with an initial focus on recognizing and manipulating the species of corals in the damaged Belize reefs, and stable control and manipulation from the robot;

• refine the software and hardware to mission-ready and produce first live demo in a public aquarium.

  buy, and/or configure from existing equipment, an additional coralbot allowing us to demonstrate accelerated and co-operative restoration through 'swarm intelligence'  

• cover transport, personnel and consumables costs (batteries) for first mission attempting to restore a damaged coral reef.

Before launching in the deep sea, our first mission will take place in Belize where we can carefully monitor the coralbots performance safe in the knowledge that land is nearby! Future missions are destined from deep coral reefs off Scandinavia in about 300 feet of water. Your support will provide a conservation solution that paves the way for coral reef monitoring and restoration across the globe, as well as a wealth of additional marine conservation programmes that become enabled by minimal further adaptation to this technology. 

Here is roughly what will happen depending on the funds we raise with your help: 

below $30,000:  a qualified keen researcher costs $3000 per month, and to secure an excellent Masters student to do their project with us may cost anything from $200 to $2000 (if they need accomm). We will optimise the funds against these and similar resources and make as much progress as possible on the computational intelligence underpinnings. Much of the work here will be in experimentaion to find out how big a piece of coral can be manipulated, appropriate design of robot frame, achieving good co-ordination between vision and manipulation, and improving precision in placement. At $30,000  we expect be able to do what's necessary to achieve our first demonstration in a public aquarium, with at least one coralbot.  The nearer we get to $30,000, the more of the underpinning techniques will have been developed and refined, and additional fundraising efforts will soon get us there, but we may well be able to achieve a representative but limied-functionality demo before that.  

between $30,000 and $80,000 - with $80,000, we should be able to procure the person time and transport to achieve our first in-the-wild mission in Belize with a single coralbot.  OR, we can procure a suitably capable second coralbot, install/test the required additional computational intelligence, and demonstrate restoration activities with a co-operating 'swarm' of two coralbots in a public aquarium. There is sense in developing the swarm-based solution before the first tests, since this may significantly improve the impact of missions. Between $30,000 and $80,000 there are many possibilities, and what we might do will be affected by other factors - e.g. we may have been able to obtain additional equipment from other sources. In any case we will discuss the options with our Funders.  

between $80,000 and $120,000 -  at $120,000 we should be in a position to deliver a two-coralbot tets mission in Belize.  Between $80,000 and $120,000, as above, many options are available that we will discuss with our Funders,  but most likely we would be further refining the technologies, in simulation and with tank-testing, to prepare mission ready capability for Belize, Sweden and other sites.