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Robots to rebuild reefs! Pls Help this Kickstarter!

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weboflies

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Trying to spread the word about these guys. If anyone's got an extra couple of bucks around, please give some thought to donating to this Kickstarter campaign. No donation is too small!

This is a way you can do something that will have a real and positive effect on the marine environment. At 50 bucks you can adopt a robot, and they'll update you on how it's doing!

Coral-bots: teams of robots that repair coral reefs by Coralbot team ? Kickstarter
 
bump...
 
It's a shame, but it doesn't look like they'll make it.
 
And they didn't make it, got roughly 1/3 of the target, so the kickstarter pledges are voided.

They've relaunched with more moderate initial goals on indiegogo, which has a number of advantages, including USA tax deductability for donors.
Restoring Coral Reefs with Robots | Indiegogo
 
Another bump after three weeks, that ought to be reasonable.
The indiegogo campaign just crossed the $10K mark, 1/3 of the way towards their scaled-back goal for a pilot project, with 37 days left.
I think this is a very interesting use of robotics technology, early days, with a lot to learn, but very promising.

Coralbots: Restoring and Conserving Coral Reefs with Robots | Indiegogo
 
I read all that stuff about the robots, and it sounds nice, but the practicalities of running robots in salt water?
Tethered ROV's require some pretty esoteric support, and even at this juncture, they're still nightmares to operate and maintain. Turning a robot loose at any depth untethered?
I don't think it's remotely feasible, but hey, that's just me. Other people are free to vote with their wallets.
 
So...These robots are supposed to go out, find healthy corals that are actually doing well, against the odds, pry them off the seafloor, move them to somewhere where corals are not doing well, and glue them to the bottom?!?

And this is a good idea....HOW???


Your money would be better spent supporting other reef restoration initiatives than this long shot that looks like it will do more harm than good.
 
So...These robots are supposed to go out, find healthy corals that are actually doing well, against the odds, pry them off the seafloor, move them to somewhere where corals are not doing well, and glue them to the bottom?!?

And this is a good idea....HOW???


Your money would be better spent supporting other reef restoration initiatives than this long shot that looks like it will do more harm than good.

If you think about it, it makes sense. Think of it this way.... When a person is covered head to toe with burns, they don't take any of the burned/bad skin to cover it, they will take good/healthy skin and apply it to the area that needs recovery.

Also, if you took time to read the proposal they will take coral that has fallen off (IE not part of the established coral structure) or donations of coral from a coral nursery. They are NOT just going up to the reef and and pulling a piece of coral off and planting it somewhere else.

---------- Post added June 30th, 2013 at 11:41 AM ----------

I read all that stuff about the robots, and it sounds nice, but the practicalities of running robots in salt water?
Tethered ROV's require some pretty esoteric support, and even at this juncture, they're still nightmares to operate and maintain. Turning a robot loose at any depth untethered?
I don't think it's remotely feasible, but hey, that's just me. Other people are free to vote with their wallets.

I agree, but there has to be a starting point somewhere, and why not here with them? I mean, if that sort of reasoning was a the forefront of Cousteau and Gagnan we wouldn't have the SCUBA we have today, instead still very much rely on hard hat diving.
 
If you think about it, it makes sense. Think of it this way.... When a person is covered head to toe with burns, they don't take any of the burned/bad skin to cover it, they will take good/healthy skin and apply it to the area that needs recovery.

No...if you think about it, it still doesn't make sense. Skin grows rapidly, and still needs months of painful care and additional surgury to cover burns.

Also, if you took time to read the proposal they will take coral that has fallen off (IE not part of the established coral structure) or donations of coral from a coral nursery. They are NOT just going up to the reef and and pulling a piece of coral off and planting it somewhere else.

They use the words transplant. Which means remove the coral and re-glue it. Now, assuming this is their plan; there's supposedly this mass of broken off coral at these depths that they're going to harvest and re-glue? Regluing coral magically makes it healthy again?

I can forsee these robots doing much more damage from bumping, grounding, and poking and prodding the bottom.

I agree, but there has to be a starting point somewhere, and why not here with them? I mean, if that sort of reasoning was a the forefront of Cousteau and Gagnan we wouldn't have the SCUBA we have today, instead still very much rely on hard hat diving.

Because they don't have a clue about the difficulties of what they're doing. They haven't even planned to test this in an ocean, just an aquarium. Would you dive in the ocean with a buddy whose only experience was the pool? Kickstarter and the like are just ways for people to live off gullible people's donations-when their projects inevitably fail, they're not accountable to anyone.

There should be a starting point. How about established and funded research programs; who are still designing the simplest independent underwater robots.
 
Take a look at the team and their background and experience. These are not naive newbies, either about coral and marine ecology, or the underwater robotics and related technologies they're proposing to use.

Coral transplant recovery has been going on for awhile, and seems to be working from what I understand, I've seen little bits of it diving Key Largo and Bonaire. But it's very labor intensive, and there's a lot of area that needs recovery. A way to make it scale practically is what this project is investigating.

Sure, these are academics, and they make a living getting grants to investigate and pilot things that haven't been done before, and might not work the first or second attempt. But that's an honest and productive living, society needs more of that. Based on the cv's of the staff, I'm not really concerned about them negligently tearing up the reefs, and I do think they understand many of the difficulties. They certainly seem like the crew that will learn from whatever doesn't work the first time, and maybe make some progress.

The end goal resonates with me as a diver, and the application of complex technologies resonates with me as a (retired) engineer.
The whole unlikely (at first glance) project tickles me enough to throw them a few bucks just to see what happens.
The reefs are dieing. Got a better idea?
 

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