Designing a small-sized autonomous underwater vehicle architecture for regular periodic fish-cage net inspection

摘要

Fish-cage dysfunctionalities in aquaculture installations can trigger significant negative consequences in the operational costs. Fish escapes due to problems in the infrastructure or increased death rates as a result of the existing environmental conditions are just a few of the most common reasons. Therefore, frequent periodic inspection of fish-cage nets is required, which can become a very expensive task. Small sized, low-cost autonomous devices can offer a lower cost alternative solution, providing also more frequent inspection and efficient timely alarming capabilities. In this paper, the design and operational characteristics of a small-sized Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) architecture are presented, yielding to a powerful tool for regular periodic fish-cage net inspection in terms of net holes and fouling. The proposed AUV system consists of different sensing components and utilizes advanced optical recognition techniques to automatically navigate within the aquaculture installation and detect fish-cage nets dysfunctionalities. Preliminary results extracted under the testing procedure in real conditions indicate that the proposed framework can prove a cost-effective, flexible and operative solution to provide appropriate corrective measures in order to eliminate fish escapes and minimise related maintenance and repair costs in fish infrastructure.