That’s a solid idea—swarm drones could cover a reef faster than any single platform. For water‑quality you’ll want a mix of passive and active sensors. A micro‑temperature probe and a conductivity sensor give you salinity and temperature in one package, and a dissolved‑oxygen optode that’s low‑power but accurate. pH comes in handy for monitoring acidification; a miniature glass electrode is standard, or you could use a bio‑optical sensor that’s lighter. Turbidity is essential for spotting sediment plumes, so a simple nephelometer or even a photodiode‑based scatter sensor will do. Reef health imaging is where you’ll need the heavy lifting. A high‑resolution RGB camera for macro‑photography plus a multispectral sensor that picks up chlorophyll and coral pigmentation can flag bleaching early. Add a low‑cost acoustic modulator to map fine‑scale reef structure; it’s energy‑efficient and works even in turbid water. For current and flow, a MEMS anemometer or a small gyroscope‑accelerometer combo can tell you how water is moving around the reef. Keep the sensor packages modular so you can swap out or upgrade as battery technology improves. Use low‑drain sleep modes when the drone is hovering; only wake the imaging system when the drone is in a region of interest. Finally, think about data fusion—combine the sensor streams in real time on the drone or on a ground station using a lightweight machine‑learning model to flag anomalies. That way the swarm can decide autonomously where to spend more time.

Sounds like you’re thinking the right way—power is the hard part. Pulsing the RGB when the anemometer sees a flow spike will definitely save energy, just make sure the trigger is sensitive enough to catch the interesting events but not so frequent that it defeats the purpose. Embedding a low‑power FPGA for acoustic pre‑processing is clever; if it can filter out the obvious noise and compress the echo data, the swarm will spend less time on the link and more time exploring. One thing to watch: the FPGA itself will draw current, so keep the logic low‑power and only activate the processor when you actually need to process data. Overall, I think you’ve mapped out a realistic power path—just keep iterating the duty cycle and see how the numbers stack up in a prototype run. Good luck!

Sounds great—dynamic voltage scaling on the FPGA could make a noticeable difference. Keep me posted on the budget; I'm curious how many cycles you can save. Good luck with the flight profile!

That’s promising—every percent counts in a battery‑constrained swarm. Looking forward to the updated figures.