Autonomy and remote control technology in sea aquaculture activities

Current state-of-the-art technologies and operations for sea-based aquaculture farms are highly dependent on manual labour and close human interaction with the process and cage structures, where the need for personnel to operate on fish farms, including highly specialised divers, is a risk factor for safety matters as well as a significant economic cost. Hence, new reliable technological solutions with more autonomy and remote control features by means of unmanned vessels can minimise personnel exposure time, reduce cost and improve regularity and planning of operations such as net inspection and dead fish removal. Moreover, motivated by good water quality and lack of available sheltered locations, the industry is moving to more exposed areas and this renders manual work difficult and highlights the need for autonomous vessels, teleoperations and remote control. Autonomy and remote control technology can hence deliver the key to open areas that are exposed to harsh weather conditions to sea aquaculture activities. This talk will present the ongoing research within SINTEF Ocean in the fields of autonomy, remote control and robotics for sea aquaculture, since SINTEF Ocean has been investigating unmanned vessels and remote technology for application in aquaculture sites for the last 10 years where the most relevant concluded project is MerdROV. The MerdROV project developed navigation and station-keeping control systems for ROVs, for aquaculture specific operations such as net cleaning, inspection and repair, and showed that holes in the net can be detected via computer vision algorithms. Given the promising results, a new generation of ongoing projects within autonomy and remote control followed: ARTIFEX, CageReporter, RACE, EXPOSED, INDISAL and CrowdGuard.