Abstract
Management of sea-based fish farms typically entails manual, and often challenging, inspection operations to monitor equipment, structures and biomass, which may result in sub-optimal and costly operations, insufficient maintenance, a general lack of control in daily routines and potential high risks for welfare of personnel and fish. This implies a need for new methods and technology for operations in modern fish farms, especially when moving operations to more exposed locations with more challenging environmental conditions, and when using new farm designs. At present, it is difficult to perform optimized operations with respect to time, costs and operational efficiency describing the complex and dynamic environment of fish cages (up to 1000 t fish in 50.000 m3), while there is increased trend for use of remotely operated UUVs in fish farms for a variety of applications (e.g. inspection of structures and nets, net cleaning and repair, monitoring of fish health and behaviour). However, in order to increase objectivity and efficiency during such operations, it is crucial to develop solutions where the UUVs operate autonomously with limited human involvement. This presentation will focus on autonomous solutions adapted to aquaculture industry. We will present results from Aquaculture Operations and Robotics group aiming to introduce and develop innovative solutions that will be able to deal with any environment and in interaction with the biomass under any possible conditions and perform demanding operations in aquaculture production of fish.