Norway is the world’s largest producer of farmed Atlantic salmon and a top exporter of seafood, while america stays the most important importer of those products, in line with the Food and Agriculture Organization. Two MIT students recently traveled to Trondheim, Norway to explore the cutting-edge technologies being developed and deployed in offshore aquaculture.
Beckett Devoe, a senior in artificial intelligence and decision-making, and Tony Tang, a junior in mechanical engineering, first worked with MIT Sea Grant through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP). They contributed to projects specializing in wave generator design and machine learning applications for analyzing oyster larvae health in hatcheries. While near-shore aquaculture is a well-established industry across Massachusetts and america, open-ocean farming remains to be a nascent field here, facing unique and complicated challenges.
To assist higher understand this emerging industry, MIT Sea Grant created a collaborative initiative, AquaCulture Shock, with funding from an Aquaculture Technologies and Education Travel Grant through the National Sea Grant College Program. Collaborating with the MIT-Scandinavia MISTI (MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives) program, MIT Sea Grant matched Devoe and Tang with aquaculture-related summer internships at SINTEF Ocean, one among the most important research institutes in Europe.
“The chance to work on this hands-on aquaculture project, under a world-renowned research institution, in an area of the world known for its innovation in marine technology — that is what MISTI is all about,” says Madeline Smith, managing director for MIT-Scandinavia. “Not only are students gaining beneficial experience of their fields of study, but they’re developing cultural understanding and skills that equip them to be future global leaders.” Each students worked inside SINTEF Ocean’s Aquaculture Robotics and Autonomous Systems Laboratory (ACE-Robotic Lab), a facility designed to develop and test latest aquaculture technologies.
“Norway has this unique geography where it has all of those fjords,” says Sveinung Ohrem, research manager for the Aquaculture Robotics and Automation Group at SINTEF Ocean. “So you’ve plenty of sheltered waters, which makes it ideal to do sea-based aquaculture.” He estimates that there are a couple of thousand fish farms along Norway’s coast, and walks through a number of the tools getting used within the industry: decision-making systems to assemble and visualize data for the farmers and operators; robots for inspection and cleansing; environmental sensors to measure oxygen, temperature, and currents; echosounders that send out acoustic signals to trace where the fish are; and cameras to assist estimate biomass and fine-tune feeding. “Feeding is a large challenge,” he notes. “Feed is the most important cost, by far, so optimizing feeding results in a really significant decrease in your cost.”
Throughout the internship, Devoe focused on a project that uses AI for fish feeding optimization. “I try to take a look at different features of the farm — so perhaps how big the fish are, or how cold the water is … and use that to try to provide the farmers an optimal feeding amount for the very best outcomes, while also saving money on feed,” he explains. “It was good to learn some more machine learning techniques and just recuperate at that on a real-world project.”
In the identical lab, Tang worked on the simulation of an underwater vehicle-manipulator system to navigate farms and repair damage on cage nets with a robotic arm. Ohrem says there are literally thousands of aquaculture robots operating in Norway today. “The size is large,” he says. “You’ll be able to’t have 8,000 people controlling 8,000 robots — that’s not economically or practically feasible. So the extent of autonomy in all of those robots must be increased.”
The collaboration between MIT and SINTEF Ocean began in 2023 when MIT Sea Grant hosted Eleni Kelasidi, a visiting research scientist from the ACE-Robotic Lab. Kelasidi collaborated with MIT Sea Grant director Michael Triantafyllou and professor of mechanical engineering Themistoklis Sapsis developing controllers, models, and underwater vehicles for aquaculture, while also investigating fish-machine interactions.
“We’ve had an extended and fruitful collaboration with the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and SINTEF, which continues with essential efforts corresponding to the aquaculture project with Dr. Kelasidi,” Triantafyllou says. “Norway is on the forefront of offshore aquaculture and MIT Sea Grant is investing on this field, so we anticipate great results from the collaboration.”
Kelasidi, who’s now a professor at NTNU, also leads the Field Robotics Lab, specializing in developing resilient robotic systems to operate in very complex and harsh environments. “Aquaculture is one of the difficult field domains we will exhibit any autonomous solutions, because all the pieces is moving,” she says. Kelasidi describes aquaculture as a deeply interdisciplinary field, requiring more students with backgrounds each in biology and technology. “We cannot develop technologies which are applied for industries where we don’t have biological components,” she explains, “after which apply them somewhere where we’ve a live fish or other live organisms.”
Ohrem affirms that maintaining fish welfare is the first driver for researchers and corporations operating in aquaculture, especially because the industry continues to grow. “So the massive query is,” he says, “how are you going to be certain that?” SINTEF Ocean has 4 research licenses for farming fish, which they operate through a collaboration with SalMar, the second-largest salmon farmer on this planet. The scholars had the chance to go to one among the industrial-scale farms, Singsholmen, on the island of Hitra. The farm has 10 large, round net pens about 50 meters across that stretch deep below the surface, each holding as much as 200,000 salmon. “I got to physically touch the nets and see how the [robotic] arm might give you the option to repair the online,” says Tang.
Kelasidi emphasizes that the knowledge gained in the sector can’t be learned from the office or lab. “That opens up and makes you realize, what’s the dimensions of the challenges, or the dimensions of the facilities,” she says. She also highlights the importance of international and institutional collaboration to advance this field of research and develop more resilient robotic systems. “We’d like to try to focus on that problem, and let’s solve it together.”
MIT Sea Grant and the MIT-Scandinavia MISTI program are currently recruiting a brand new cohort of 4 MIT students to intern in Norway this summer with institutes advancing offshore farming technologies, including NTNU’s Field Robotics Lab in Trondheim. Students considering autonomy, deep learning, simulation modeling, underwater robotic systems, and other aquaculture-related areas are encouraged to succeed in out to Lily Keyes at MIT Sea Grant.
