  Coral reefs are under increasing threat from the impacts of climate change.
Whilst current restoration approaches are effective, they require significant
human involvement and equipment, and have limited deployment scale. Harvesting
wild coral spawn from mass spawning events, rearing them to the larval stage
and releasing the larvae onto degraded reefs is an emerging solution for reef
restoration known as coral reseeding. This paper presents a reconfigurable
autonomous surface vehicle system that can eliminate risky diving, cover
greater areas with coral larvae, has a sensory suite for additional data
measurement, and requires minimal non-technical expert training. A key feature
is an on-board real-time benthic substrate classification model that predicts
when to release larvae to increase settlement rate and ultimately,
survivability. The presented robot design is reconfigurable, light weight,
scalable, and easy to transport. Results from restoration deployments at Lizard
Island demonstrate improved coral larvae release onto appropriate coral
substrate, while also achieving 21.8 times more area coverage compared to
manual methods.
