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Towards autonomous contact-free operations in aquaculture

Abstract

As offshore fish farms are established farther away from the shore, increased exposure to the elements prevents regular operations from being performed safely with vessels moored alongside the flexible fish cage and personnel performing tasks standing on the collar. Due to the higher environmental impact at more exposed locations, new concepts and solutions for automating daily aquaculture operations need to be developed. One solution that has been proposed is to carry out operations using a robotic arm mounted on the main deck of a service vessel while it does stationkeeping next to the cage. The purpose of this article is to summarise our research on the viability of this concept. Vessel motions are simulated for a representative vessel model and realistic sea states, and a robotic arm does motion-compensated trajectory tracking while mounted on a hexapod platform moving according to the simulated vessel motions. Relevant challenges in marine aquaculture operations are summarised, the method used to obtain realistic simulated vessel motions is documented, the results of the experiments are presented, and the remaining open questions to evaluate the potential of the proposed system are discussed.
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Category

Academic article

Language

English

Affiliation

  • SINTEF Digital / Mathematics and Cybernetics
  • SINTEF Ocean / Skip og havkonstruksjoner
  • Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Year

2023

Published in

Ocean Engineering

ISSN

0029-8018

Volume

282

View this publication at Norwegian Research Information Repository