The surfing robot helping to save the Great Barrier Reef

Trial marks start of Australian Institute of Marine Science partnership with Boeing to monitor reef “from the seabed to space”

The Wave Glider has been used for similar missions elsewhere in the world. Since last year, the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office has used one to police an 840,000 square kilometers of remote marine habitat surrounding its remote Pitcairn Islands territory in the Pacific Ocean.

The craft there is equipped with a camera that can photograph fishing vessels passing restricted areas, and is able to pinpoint their location. 

They have also been used in military and commercial settings. Chevron has used the autonomous vessel around its operation off the coast of north west Australia to measure turbidity and demonstrate environmental compliance.

Seabed to space

The surfing robot is the first of a number of technologies being put to work on the reef by AIMS, the result of a five-year joint research agreement with aerospace giant Boeing. The vessel is made by Boeing subsidiary Liquid Robotics.

AIMS and Boeing are now planning to trial other technologies, which will help monitor the reef “from the seabed to space” Llewelyn said.

“Wave Glider is just one element. It provides us with the surface element. [Boeing] have got extraordinary capability in terms of satellites, aerial drones, autonomous underwater vessels,” he explained.

“The thing for us is, it’s got to be something that can provide routine, robust data. It’s one thing for someone to go out and look at something once – we need to go there again and again and again. That’s one of the challenges and there’s a very rich landscape of new technologies coming out. So it’s a process of identifying those things with potential,” Llewelyn said.

Work has already begun – with Boeing company Insitu Pacific  – to investigate the use of medium-range unmanned aerial systems equipped with hyperspectral cameras to collect high-quality imagery for seabed habitat mapping, modelling and classification, reef monitoring, and potentially 3-D reef reconstructions.

Much of the collected data will go towards validating eReefs, a six-year $30 million project begun in 2012 that measures and models the conditions on the Great Barrier Reef.

“That can then be used for forecasting and looking at different scenarios, trying to understand the phenomena we see,” Llewelyn explained.

“We’ve had two big bleaching events and one of the big drivers for that is sea water temperature. So understanding how sea water temperature behaves and what is happening out there allows us to recommend and design ways of dealing with it. And it might seem small, but understanding how the water moves, where, when and why – there’s still a lot to learn in that space in the Great Barrier Reef,” he added.

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Tags environmentboeingGreat Barrier ReefLiquid RoboticscoralAustralian Institute of Marine ScienceInsitu PacificAIMS

More about AustraliaAustralian Institute of Marine ScienceAustralian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS)

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