Shellfish aquaculture plays an important role in the coastal economy. The United States is the world’s second largest seafood consumer and ranks 17th in total aquaculture production. Among the marine aquaculture species, oysters are one of the top U.S. species, which produced more than $200 million worth of oysters in 2018. The Smart, Sustainable Shellfish Aquaculture Management (S3AM) program integrates the fields of Engineering, Computer Science, Biology, Environmental Science and Aquaculture to address the identified industry needs and tackle the challenge of establishing sustainable shellfish farming with significantly enhanced productivity and profitability. This presentation will focus on the smart precision harvesting in this program.
A towed dredge is the primary tool for harvesting oysters, which has changed little in the past 200 years. However, this traditional method is inefficient, since the oyster distribution is unknown and the farmers can only blindly and randomly tow the dredge in a certain area. To improve efficiency, we proposed a precision harvesting system. In the precision harvesting system, we considered the oyster distribution maps and dredge localization, and applied path planning techniques to obtain an optimal harvesting path for boats. Besides, we also collected real harvesting paths through field experiments and developed a simulator for comparing the traditional random path with our optimized path.