Photo: Eleni Kelasidi /Sintef

How robots affect fish surprises researchers

The following is an excerpt from an article published by SINTEF:

Norway is world leading in the use of robotics in the fish farming industry. But how does the technical equipment affect the fish? Surprisingly much, says cyberneticist Eleni Kelasidi.

“I thought it would be quite simple and straight forward to use the same technology in aquaculture as in oil and gas, but I got a serious wake-up call during my first visit to a fish farm,” says Eleni Kelasidi. She had a PhD in snake robotics for the oil and gas industry, when she became a researcher at SINTEF Ocean's aquaculture department.

“I didn’t really understand how much it changes the premises for operations that everything is moving and that the work area is full of living animals. It’s completely different having a robot work in the open sea with stagnant, dead metal on pipelines or turbines,” she explains. After robotics made its way into the fish farming industry, aquaculture has largely adopted equipment developed for the oil and gas industry. Kelasidi believes aquaculture needs its own specialised robotics and has researched which solutions are least disturbing to the fish.

The fish's own safety distance

“When we talk about interaction between humans and robots, it goes without saying that human needs and safety have the highest priority. The same principle forms the basis of the Fish-Machine Interaction project. We want to contribute to better robots that can work quickly and efficiently, but they must of course take the fish' needs and safety into account,” she says.

Illustration of fish maschine interaction concept. Eleni Kelasidi/Sintef

Eleni Kelasidi, PostDoc Qin Zhang from NTNU and the rest of the team, have collected and analysed data in various fish cages associated with SINTEF ACE over a three-year period. They have collected data from different locations, at different times of the year and life stages of the fish. “We have conducted several different measurements per case, so we have an extensive data collection,” says the senior researcher.

The study provides some very clear answers, including how large a safety distance the fish keeps to an object. “The ratio between the size of fish and the distance they keep to foreign objects is actually linear, which surprised us all. The smaller the fish, the smaller the distance,” says Kelasidi.

Equipment that is lowered into the water blocks more volume than the actual equipment itself; and the safety distance that the fish keep, has consequences for how cramped the cage becomes during various operations. Based on this study, breeders can know which distance the fish will keep to the equipment they put down. Five-kilo fish for example, keep a distance of three metres. The fact that younger and smaller fish operate with a more modest safety distance means in practice that more equipment can be placed in the cage for young fish without affecting their swimming routines and behaviour, compared with older fish.[...]

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