Mindorobots

Coral reef ecosystems are some of the diverse and valuable ecosystems on earth. They support more species per unit area than any other marine environment. However, due to climate change, only about 46% of the world’s coral were considered healthy in 2008 and this percentage has dropped further recently.

We started Mindorobots to make it affordable and viable for local communities to map and conserve their reefs.

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A giant issue with coral conservation is thatreef mapping is done by divers moving and photographing a PVC quadrat for every unit area of the reef. MindoroBot is a swarm-robot which can sail and photograph and map reefs autonomously at a low cost with a laser quadrat. We hacked an aerial mapping drone to be able to do this and ran our prototype in Mindoro island, the Philippines. 

We were successfully able to create a stitched map at one tenth the cost and one fifth the time (50x improvement)

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We've been awarded the James Dyson Award runner up in 2018 and the Gallant Ho Experiential Learning Fund at HKU. Our work was featured in numerous top news publications such as the Manila Bulletin and broadcast on GMA News. 

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Our work was possible because of our partners at the Gallant Ho Experiential Learning Fund, the University of Hong Kong.

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We'd also like to extend our thanks to Scoutbots, Cesar Harada, Makerbay HK, Maker Family HK, Green Orange Intl., Eddie Yung, Ken Chew, Tarek Touble, Ecotone Resilience, Prof. Helen Yap, the University of the Philippines and the locals in Mindoro island for helping us throughout the project!

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