Salmon behavioural response to robots in an aquaculture sea cage

Animal-robot studies can inform us about animal behaviour and inspire advances in agriculture, environmental monitoring and animal health and welfare. Currently, experimental results on how fish are affected by the presence of underwater robots are largely limited to laboratory environments with few individuals and a focus on model species. Laboratory studies provide valuable insight, but their results are not necessarily generalizable to larger scales such as marine aquaculture. This paper examines the effects of underwater robots and a human diver in a large fish aggregation within a Norwegian aquaculture facility, with the explicit purpose to improve the use of underwater robots for fish observations.

We observed aquaculture salmon’s reaction to the flipper-propelled robot U-CAT in a sea cage with 188,000 individuals. A significant difference in fish behaviour was found using U-CAT when compared to a thruster-driven underwater robot, Argus Mini and a human diver. Specifically, sal...