PANAJI: The Goa-headquartered National Institute of Oceanography (NIO) has launched a coral monitoring autonomous underwater vehicle, Coral Reef Monitoring and Surveillance Robot, or C-bot, for long-term monitoring of coral reefs.

Dr N Kalaiselvi, director general of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) said C-bot, which can reach depths of 200 metres, was their first step to building a capable underwater vehicle that can scan the depth of the Indian Ocean.

“We have plans to develop it further by means of which we will be able to do deep diving. So from 200 metres, we will aim for thousands of metres in the sea,” Dr Kalaiselvi told reporters at a briefing after the underwater vehicle’s launch on Sunday.

“Because of climate change, coral bleaching is taking place. With different sensors, different cameras, it measures what the parameters are, and might help explain why the corals are dying the way they are,” NIO director Sunil Kumar Singh said.

The vehicle will also help the Navy perform bathymetry studies to help plot navigation channels and scope out hydrothermal vents, where geothermally heated water seeps up from deep below the ocean floor.

“It will also help in finding the active hydrothermal vents which are emitting a lot of elements into the ocean and active biology which is going on in many places like in many extreme environments where the temperature is 400-500 °C. We will take photographs and samples in real-time,” he added.