According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, Norway is the world's largest producer of farmed Atlantic salmon and a top exporter of seafood, while the United States stays the most important importer of the products. Two MIT students recently traveled to Trondheim, Norway, to explore the cutting-edge technologies being developed and utilized in offshore aquaculture.
Beckett Devoe, a senior in artificial intelligence and decision-making, and Tony Tang, a junior in mechanical engineering, initially worked with MIT Sea Grant as a part of the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP). They contributed to projects focused on the design of wave generators and applications of machine learning to investigate the health of oyster larvae in hatcheries. While offshore aquaculture is a longtime industry in Massachusetts and the United States, offshore aquaculture here remains to be a fledgling field that faces unique and complicated challenges.
To higher understand this emerging industry, MIT Sea Grant has launched a collaborative initiative called AquaCulture Shock, funded by an Aquaculture Technologies and Education Travel Grant from the National Sea Grant College Program. In collaboration with the MIT-Scandinavia MISTI (MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives) program, MIT Sea Grant provided Devoe and Tang with summer internships in aquaculture at SINTEF Ocean, one in all the most important research institutes in Europe.
“The opportunity to work on this hands-on aquaculture project under a world-renowned research facility in an area of ​​the world known for its innovations in marine technology – that’s what MISTI is all about,” said Madeline Smith, executive director of MIT-Scandinavia. “Students not only gain beneficial experience of their fields of study, but in addition develop cultural understanding and skills that can make them future global leaders.” Both students worked in SINTEF Ocean's Aquaculture Robotics and Autonomous Systems Laboratory (ACE-Robotic Lab), a facility for developing and testing recent aquaculture technologies.
“Norway has a novel geography with all these fjords,” says Sveinung Ohrem, research manager for the Aquaculture Robotics and Automation Group at SINTEF Ocean. “So there are a whole lot of protected waters, which makes it ideal for marine aquaculture.” He estimates that there are around a thousand fish farms on the Norwegian coast and presents a number of the tools utilized in the industry: decision systems to gather and visualize data for farmers and operators; Robots for inspection and cleansing; Environmental sensors for measuring oxygen, temperature and currents; depth sounders, which emit acoustic signals to trace where the fish are; and cameras to estimate biomass and fine-tune feeding. “Nutrition is an enormous challenge,” he notes. “Feed is by far the most important cost, so optimizing feeding will significantly reduce your costs.”
During the internship, Devoe focused on a project that uses AI to optimize fish feeding. “I try to have a look at the several characteristics of the farm – for instance how big the fish are or how cold the water is… and check out to present farmers the optimal amount of feed for the most effective results while saving money on feed,” he explains. “It was good to learn more machine learning techniques and improve them in an actual project.”
In the identical lab, Tang worked on simulating an underwater vehicle manipulator system to make use of a robotic arm to navigate through farms and repair damage to cage nets. According to Ohrem, there are literally thousands of aquaculture robots in use in Norway today. “The scope is large,” he says. “You can't have 8,000 people controlling 8,000 robots – that's not economically or practically feasible. So the extent of autonomy in all these robots must be increased.”
The collaboration between MIT and SINTEF Ocean began in 2023 when MIT Sea Grant hosted Eleni Kelasidi, a visiting scientist from the ACE Robotic Lab. Kelasidi worked with MIT Sea Grant director Michael Triantafyllou and mechanical engineering professor Themistoklis Sapsis to develop controls, models and underwater vehicles for aquaculture while studying fish-machine interactions.
“We have a protracted and fruitful collaboration with the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and SINTEF, which continues with vital efforts similar to the aquaculture project with Dr. Kelasidi,” says Triantafyllou. “Norway is on the forefront of offshore aquaculture and MIT Sea Grant is investing on this area, so we expect great results from the collaboration.”
Kelasidi, who’s now a professor at NTNU, also leads the Field Robotics Lab, which focuses on developing robust robotic systems to be used in very complex and harsh environments. “Aquaculture is some of the difficult disciplines wherein we will reveal autonomous solutions because the whole lot is moving,” she says. Kelasidi describes aquaculture as a deeply interdisciplinary field that requires more students with biology and engineering backgrounds. “We can’t develop technologies which might be applied in industries where we don’t have biological components,” she explains, “after which apply them somewhere where we now have a live fish or other living organism.”
Ohrem reiterates that preserving fish welfare is a very powerful driver for researchers and firms working in aquaculture, especially because the industry continues to grow. “So the massive query is,” he says, “how do you be sure that?” SINTEF Ocean has 4 research licenses for fish farming, which they operate in collaboration with SalMar, the second largest salmon farmer on the planet. The students had the chance to go to one in all the commercial plants, Singsholmen, on the island of Hitra. The farm has 10 large, round net pens, roughly 50 meters in diameter, positioned deep below the surface, each housing as much as 200,000 salmon. “I could physically touch the nets and see how the (robotic) arm could repair the web,” Tang says.
Kelasidi emphasizes that the data gained in the sector can’t be learned within the office or laboratory. “It opens you up and makes you realize how big the challenges are or how big the facilities are,” she says. She also emphasizes the importance of international and institutional collaboration to advance this research area and develop more resilient robotic systems. “We need to try to handle this problem and solve it together.”
MIT Sea Grant and the MIT-Scandinavia MISTI program are currently recruiting a brand new cohort of 4 MIT students for an internship in Norway this summer at institutes advancing offshore agriculture technologies, including NTNU's Field Robotics Lab in Trondheim. Students keen on autonomy, deep learning, simulation modeling, underwater robotic systems, and other areas related to aquaculture are encouraged to contact Lily Keyes at MIT Sea Grant.
