engleski

Potentials of Using Underwater Robotics for Fishing and Fish Farming

The use of robotics finds more and more space among applications in marine environment. Once restricted to military and oil drilling applications, the today's underwater robotics covers more disciplines. It became a cheap, reliable and affordable platform that can be used in various surveys, mapping and other underwater activities by both research communities as well as various types of industry. It finds applications in marine biology, archeology and ecology. The general aim, purpose and the reason for using the underwater robots is gathering better knowledge about marine environment and consequently perform better management of underwater resources. This paper presents the applications of underwater technology in fishing and fish farming. Along these lines several potential applications, addressing both fishing and fish farming, will be addressed, explained and discussed. The use of underwater robots for cleaning the aquaculture nets is addressed in the first part of the paper. Fish farming suffers from biofouling which can hurt fish, increase mortality and consequently reduce production. It is necessary to clean the nets in order to sustain the flow of oxygen-rich water through the cage. The conventional methods of cleaning, primarily manual cleaning, is quite time-consuming requiring extensive men-hours. The overview of several new systems, based on high pressure cleaning, that hit the market recently, is given.. They rely on heavy equipment making these systems unusable for small producers. The novel approach and methods in cleaning are needed. The discussion on strategy and economy on introducing ultrasonic underwater robot in cleaning and prevention of biofouling build-up is given in detail. The second part of the paper deals with surveying and monitoring potentially protected marine areas in order to manage them more efficiently. Regular and frequent monitoring of marine environment results in estimating the amount of biomass in it as well as the water conditions. Regular monitoring may result in determining the amount of protected areas reserved for spawning of fish. It would allow determine when certain spices of fish spawn. Gathered knowledge helps in better management of the underwater resources and may determine the length of the period when fishing is to be allowed as well as amount of total biomass of the fish that is to be fished out from the sea. Monitoring also allows determining the impact of fishing and fish farms to environment.

marine robots ; fishing ; aquaculture

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