A Magnetic Island engineer believes a robot could be one way of saving the Great Barrier Reef.
According to Stephen Rodan, large-scale aquaculture operations like coral farms have an issue because they rely on the free labour of students and volunteers for vital tasks like cleaning tanks.
“These volunteers cannot be relied upon for the future of land-based aquaculture,” he said.
Mr Rodan, who worked on Great Barrier Reef-related projects for NASA and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said such manual labour consumes an enormous amount of workers’ time and effort each year.
“Farms that produce 100,000 to 500,000 corals annually … have over 50 per cent of the budget spent on manual tasks.”
As an engineer, he decided to find a way to automate them so that more time could be spent on research.
During the pandemic, Mr Rodan began developing the Coral Husbandry Automated Raceway Machine, or CHARM.
The robot, which looks like a giant 3D printer, is homed in a porta-built facility in North Queensland’s Nelly Bay terminal.
It sits on top of the coral farms and includes features like a 4K camera, which can identify signs of stress and disease.
It has a feeding tube that shoots a “plankton smoothie” to the coral directly rather than being dissolved or diluted in the tank.
It also has a rotating brush, a water jet for cleaning the tanks and coral, and a robot “hand” that can pick up and move corals between tanks without damaging them.
Mr Rodan said he plans to have one of the systems ready to use by the end of the year.
“It’s a bit like artwork, I feel like I’m always improving and trying to make it a bit better, but if I don’t put a deadline on myself, I’ll be doing this till kingdom come,” he said.
The end goal is a monthly service used by aquaculture operators, rather than selling off the components, to ensure it runs exactly as needed.
“I’m selling to marine biologists,” he said.
“I don’t want them to learn another piece of software or computer coding and burden them from the hard work they’re doing. “
With the future of Townsville’s Reef HQ now secure, after council confirmed it would reallocate funding last month the American engineer said it should now look overseas for inspiration on the aquarium’s future.
He said at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Los Angeles, “all the leaders really care about coral, so they put a lot of money into the coral exhibit and put it front and centre.”
Mr Rodan said a robot-like machine could also attract more kids, as current data shows coral exhibits don’t traditionally engage them much.
“Coral isn’t as animated at the penguins and stingrays, so a kid might look at a coral and go, oh, ah, and move on,” he said.
“But I’ve had kids here, and I can’t get them away from it [the CHARM].
“One kid hosted his 12th birthday here; he’s fed his coral 500 times in the last year.”
When asked if he’d like to see the CHARM implemented at Reef HQ, Mr Rodan said it was up to the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority to decide.