Case study: Coral Maker leverages automation to speed up production

Reef restoration company Coral Maker scaled up its coral reef regenerations through implementing automation within its manufacturing processes.

Coral Maker uses a combination of technology from the masonry manufacturing industry, fixed automation, robotics and AI to speed up manual tasks in coral production and deployment.

Dr Taryn Foster, founder at Coral Maker told Digital Nation the major issue they faced within coral reef restoration was manual labour.

“A lot of the tasks are also quite repetitive tasks, there could be automated pick and place tasks that you could involve a robot for,” she said.

One of the manual tasks is a cutting and sticking task for propagating corals.

“If we want to scale to the millions, or 10s of millions mark, which is where we need to be in coral reef restoration, we're going to need to automate some of those processes,” she explained.

Using Autodesk technology, Foster and her team are able to produce coral skeleton moulds at a larger scale and at a cheaper price.

“Before this, people were either hand making things or you could buy things from the aquarium trade or industry. But they're made for a boutique aquarium. The price was quite high for one individual,” she explained.

“We needed this to be super cheap, fast to manufacture so we could meet scale requirements,” she said.

“With this mould being able to fit into these mainstream manufacturing machines, were able to do 10,000 skeletons a day.”

Foster said they have solved this problem using both advanced technologies like design and computer numerical control machining to make our moulds, and then traditional masonry manufacturing technologies to meet that scale requirement.

With this automation technology, Foster said they might soon be able to create millions or tens of millions of coral skeletons per year which is equivalent to hundreds of hectares a year.

“When you think about it, the Great Barrier reef is something like 35 million hectares. A lot of it is at risk of damage from coral bleaching,” she explained.

“We need to have solutions that can operate at a scale that are going to have an impact on an ecosystem. It has been pretty well received because we do need some technologies like this to deal with that scale problem.”