Soft-body submersibles designed to resemble and move like manta rays have been developed by a team at the School of Navigation at Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xi'an, the capital of Shaanxi Province in central China, for monitoring coral reefs.  

The research and development team began developing submersibles for coral reef monitoring in 2006, by studying the swimming patterns of marine organisms for their prototypes.

The team's smaller submersibles are utilized for marine education and coral reef monitoring, while their larger models can dive deeper and for longer periods to collect more data.