Remote control
The latest webinar in Fish Farmer’s Aqua Agenda series focused on Technology, Remote Monitoring and Artificial Intelligence. Our co-host for the event was Krucial, which has developed connectivity and communications networks for fish farms and other businesses operating in challenging marine environments.
The panel was made up of Kevin Quillien, CTO and Co-founder, Krucial; Professor Keith Davidson of the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS); Kristian Blom, CEO of AquaCloud in Norway; and joining us from Tasmania, Tim Shepherd, Senior Manager, Smart Farming and Feed, with aquaculture business Tassal.
Kevin Quillien started by explaining the issue Krucial had set out to solve. He said: “Digital transformation can really help fish farms – it can provide critical information 24/7, enable partial autonomous operations and maximise site productivity, so there’s a real need for digital technology across the whole aquaculture industry.”
Krucial is able to make use of satellite communications technology, so when 4G networks fail or in locations where they are simply unavailable, it is still possible to maintain communication links with an offshore operation.
The company’s Connected Seafarm package uses the communications system to allow remote monitoring and feeding, using a dashboard that can incorporate data from sensors from different proprietary suppliers.
Quillien said: “We are providing the industry with digital solutions that are tailored to its needs, underpinned by a technology that thrives in the most demanding conditions.”
Sharing data, sharing solutions
SAMS is an independent research organisation in Scotland which also provides teaching and commercial services.
Professor Davidson’s special area of research is related to phytoplankton, primarily regarding harmful algal blooms, and micro jellyfish.
SAMS has traditionally used microscopy to identify plankton species from manually collected samples – which is effective but time-consuming – but it is now also experimenting with optical technology. It has invested in an imaging flow cytobot.
Professor Davidson said: “The cytobot can take a picture of every single particle or phytoplankton cell in a water sample, and it will do this very quickly and it can take a sample every 20 minutes, in contrast to manual cell counts which are generally done, at best, once a day.
“We’ve been trialling this for the last 18 months at a site in Shetland, and in the process we have generated some 57 million images of phytoplankton. That’s almost too much data to deal with, so what we need is ways of processing that, so we have projects looking at the development of neural networks, to take that data and assign it to the appropriate phytoplankton genus, or species if we can, and report in real time on our website www.HABreports.org.
“In parallel, we are looking at environmental measurements to help us understand what’s causing the blooms.”
AquaCloud is the data sharing platform set up by Norway’s fish farming industry, aggregating monitoring data from fish farm sites along the coast for the participating companies. A limited amount of data is also made publicly available.
Kristian Blom said: “Currently we have 32 fish farmers – from farmers that have one site to farmers that have 100 sites, so it’s the whole spectrum of Norwegian fish farming. And we are still recruiting.
“The mission for us is to enable the farmers, researchers and suppliers to get access to data sets, to improve our understanding about what’s going on in our production.
“We strongly believe that data and digitalisation are going to be crucial.”
As Senior Manager, Smart Farming and Feed, with Tassal, Tim Shepherd has a role in Tasmania but also works across the worldwide organisation of Tassal’s parent company, Cooke Aquaculture.
He said: “Our state of the art remote operation centre is located in Hobart, Tasmania. We remotely feed, and monitor the equipment and stock on our salmon farms in Tasmania and our barramundi farm in Western Australia, which is 4,000 km away.
“My role has evolved to take on more of a global focus since Tassal became part of the Cooke Aquaculture family. We’ve had a lot of valuable collaboration on remote operation and fish performance and important technology with regions such as Canada, North America, the Mediterranean, Scotland and Chile. It’s been a great opportunity to learn from each other.”
Connectivity challenges
Kevin Quillien said: “Aquaculture is a difficult industry to digitise, for many reasons. There are some solutions developed for RAS [recirculating aquaculture systems] for example, but these may not be well adapted to offshore for many reasons, especially connectivity, and may need extensive infrastructure which may not be available at all your sites.
“For us, comprehensive digital twinning of a sector [creating a virtual model that accurately replicates a physical object, system, or process] means having a consistent infrastructure across the entire organisation.
“We have developed the Connected Seafarm to solve these problems, the problems of connectivity as well as the other barriers, with a solution that can be rolled out across the world.”
Tim Shepherd commented: “Some of our growing areas are in quite remote locations, and they are often exposed to big waves, and strong winds. That’s definitely a challenge when setting up an appropriate network.
“The fact that our network connectivity, between the farm and the ops centre, is rock solid, has enabled us to take advantage of certain things.
“For example, historically we used to have operators go out to a feed barge every day to feed, and they’d travel by boat. If the conditions were too rough, you simply couldn’t get people to the site safely. Now, the fact that we feed from Hobart means we can feed with confidence.”
Kristian Blom said: “What we’re seeing in the industry in Norway is a growing understanding of the importance of a digital strategy in some of the companies and especially the large companies with more resources.
“One of the challenges is the lack of digital competence and the understanding of its importance, and the willingness to invest.
“It goes back to the suppliers; are we creating value from the digital tools that we are giving, can we make a difference?”
For SAMS, Keith Davidson said, the marine environment was challenging but overall the 4G network had been sufficient for monitoring so far – with the caveat that not all of the Scottish coast has such coverage.
He added that fouling is also a challenge for equipment in the ocean. Technology in the marine environment needs to be very resilient, which makes it expensive.
Davidson also stressed: “There is a real need to understand the oceanography and the ecology, so we can better site these expensive instruments in sentinel sites, so they aren’t just protecting one farm but a group of farms, and hopefully spread the cost of this technology.”
Lessons from other sectors
Two questions from the audience touched on the lessons to be learned from digitisation in other sectors.
First, what could the energy industry tell us about digitisation in the marine environment?
Kevin Quillien commented: “The main difference is the depth of the pockets. The oil and gas industry can afford to build very advanced, bespoke solutions and they have huge teams of engineers. The aquaculture industry doesn’t have that luxury.
“What we need to do is democratise a lot of that capability and make it more affordable and more accessible, and adapt it, to the specific needs of the aquaculture industry.”
Secondly, the poultry industry is using computer imaging and artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor and understand behaviour and welfare issues. Can fish farming learn from this?
Tim Shepherd explained that each of the Tassal salmon pens has a movable camera and the company uses AI software to monitor feeding and response to feeding, to ensure that growth each day and feed conversion rates are optimal. This system also monitors factors such as swimming speed and fish behaviour, which are a good guide to welfare levels in the pen.
Kevin Quillien commented: “Fish behaviour is one of the most promising applications for AI in aquaculture. I think AI is suffering a little bit from being in the news all the time – it’s being seen as a magic wand that can solve anything and everything – but AI is a tool and it needs to be applied to a specific set of problems to be useful.
“In aquaculture, the value of AI will come in doing things that humans simply cannot do, or do well. For example, digesting huge amounts of images, or staring at dozens, or hundreds of camera feeds day and day out, and inferring from that the fish’s behaviour and adapting feeding, and extracting other information.
“We have a project that is initially focusing on optimising feeding. Feeding is the costliest operation during a fish growing lifecycle, so any optimisation here can have immediate impact.
“And then there’s all the other things that you can derive from fish behaviour, such as stress levels.”
Kristian Blom agreed: “Seeing how computer vision has evolved over the past years is very interesting. It has gone from ‘promising’ to now seeing results.
“Managing feeding is also something that a lot of farmers believe can really help the industry – it takes away the reliance on human decisions. I think it’s a very exciting technology.”
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