Researchers at INESC TEC have developed B-FISH, a robotic solution for biomass estimation in indoor fish farming. It will be used to automate control processes in aquaculture. This industry is increasingly interest due to the lack of natural resources to supply the growing need for fish and its derivative products.
- Challenge | Opportunity
Currently, the majority of biomass estimation procedures in fish farming industry is manual - individual fish samples are collected from the indoor tanks to be measured and weighted. This kind of approach presents several drawbacks including higher rates of fish mortality, illness, and stress. Additionally, the manual assessment of fish is labour intensive and leads to slower growth rates.
The density and biomass estimations are crucial to support fish farmers’ decisions such as fish food dosage, medicine dosage, fish loss. Despite this clear need, there was no affordable, automatic, and accurate solution available to determine fish biomass in aquaculture tanks.
• Offers a fully autonomous solution for 3D underwater mapping in indoor tank systems
• Provides a more accurate assessment of fish biomass along time
• Increases fish farming efficiency by avoiding the negative effects on fish growth rate of invasive biomass assessment methods
• 15% error in overall biomass weight in real aquaculture environment.
• Further development towards weight reduction is currently under way to allow an easy assembly and mobility inside the indoor fish farm
• Aquaculture
• Environmental control
• Underwater object detection
