Underwater drone uses AI to study coral reefs

Australia's Great Barrier Reef has been hit by a major coral bleaching event – usually triggered by warmer ocean waters.

With the help of the drone, called “Hydrus”, marine scientists aim to conduct more accurate and regular surveys to better understand the impacts of climate change on the world's most extensive reef ecosystem.

Melanie Olsen, leading the ReefWorks programme at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, said: “Traditionally, we've done this with dive teams. However dive teams can only see so much and go so far and that's where we've had to augment our survey methods to include the use of robotics, just to enable us to scale, to go deeper, to operate in areas where predators like crocodiles and bull sharks and jellyfish now routinely reside.”

Operating fully autonomously, Hydrus has a range of roughly 5.5 miles for up to 3 hours. It can go as deep as 10,000 feet underwater and capture video with a 4k camera.

The drone, developed by Advanced Navigation, also has an acoustic modem, forward facing sonar and AI-powered navigation.

The company's Subsea Product Manager, Peter Baker, says their technology is being used to build 3D maps of the reef. "We're working on coral mapping with the Australian Institute of Marine Science. And what they're trying to do is map areas of coral to detect change within those areas, which they can then use to extrapolate and model the entire reef. One of the benefits of having a robotic system is that it goes back to that same location every single time. And it takes the same photo from the same orientation every single time, which is really, really difficult to achieve with a human diver. So if you want to have a lot of scientific robustness to the data that you're collecting time and time again, a solution like Hydrus adds that," he added.

Using AI image processing, Hydrus can classify and analyse the images onboard.

"Because the system is fully autonomous, it means the decision making has to happen on board the vehicle and to do that you need AI. So we have AI sensors on board that are taking things like the camera feed in, and then they're able to make smart decisions."

Stretching more than 1,400 miles along Australia's northeastern coast, the Great Barrier Reef has seen six localized bleaching events since 1998.

Bleaching is triggered by warmer ocean waters, which cause corals to expel the colorful algae living in their tissues and turn white.

A bleached coral can recover if waters cool but if ocean temperatures remain high for longer periods, it will die.

Experts have tied the mass bleaching events to climate change.