In recent years, the interest in off-shore aquaculture has continuously grown. This type of aquaculture, due to the distance from the coast, presents interesting technological challenges. On one hand, the in-situ maintenance works and the management and control of these installations are difficult and expensive. On the other hand, off-shore aquaculture is frequently exposed to hazards and it is very important to study continuously its environmental impact, as well as to record the real productivity.
A completely automated remote controlled system for both control of biological parameters and inspection of the installations would reduce the cost gap with traditional aquaculture. It will also improve the competitiveness and economic growth of the unique ecological alternative of fish production.
To achieve such a system, this project intends to design a technologically advanced platform which enables to measure the parameters that can influence in fish production, installation inspection, and environmental impact. The innovative challenge of the ANDREA project is the design of a whole and unique system which incorporates both underwater and surface sensors and a fully Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV), all for inspection and monitoring tasks.
The solutions extracted from ANDREA will be both at the technological level (design of acoustic data transmission components, peer-to-peer underwater solutions for mobile receivers, image transmission solutions with a mobile link, intelligent alarms management, and SLAM algoritms) and in the marine off-shore aquaculture industry (acoustic low-power and low-cost modems, an Underwater Sensor Network combining Wireless and Wired conections).
