Revolutionizing the World’s Inefficiencies in Fish Farming

Labor- and resource-intensive operations make it difficult to sustain fish farms, which supply more than half of all consumed seafood worldwide, said Bing Ouyang, Ph.D., assistant research professor at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute.

But, Ouyang and co-investigators, Paul Wills, Ph.D., of FAU Harbor Branch, Jason Hallstrom, Ph.D., of the Institute for Sensing and Embedded Network Systems Engineering and Tsung- Chow Su, Eng. Sc.D., of the Department of Ocean and Mechanical Engineering, aim to change all that.

With a $1.2 million, four-year integrative project grant from the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) in collaboration with the National Science Foundation, the group designed, developed and deployed the initial prototype of a Hybrid Aerial Underwater Robotic System (HAUCS), a transformative collaborative robotic system at the Logan Hollow Fish farm in Illinois. The HAUCS will fly to various locations in a fish farm to collect water quality data, dipping sensors in the water and sending the results back to a central location to provide farmers with key information regarding water quality. This eliminates the need to perform these tasks manually.

“It’s a much more cost-effective of way for fish farmers,” Ouyang said.