Aquaculture is undergoing a transformation in scale in Australia and globally, however there’s a substantial yield gap between how much is harvested and how much could be harvested. The CSIRO has been collaborating with Australian prawn farmers to investigate how developments in precision farming technologies can help reduce this yield gap. In a three-year project, we worked directly with farmers to evaluate ideas and collect commercially relevant data to test and validate novel techniques and technologies in sensing, data modelling, situational awareness, and decision support.
Wearable Data Collection Suit is a smart glass application that could transform how aquaculture farmers carry out field jobs via hands-free interaction, situated pond water quality trend visualisation, automatic sensor data extraction and deep learning-enabled crop sampling. We hope that the system will play a vital role in upscaling the prawn farming industry by supporting staff to make more informed management decisions, faster than they can currently.
A decision support application was created for prawn farmers that makes use of real-time sensor data and state-of-the-art deep learning models to provide 24-hr forecasting and anomaly detection. Water quality in ponds is highly dynamic and challenging to manage for large farms with hundreds of ponds. Our application provides farmers with valuable information that allows them to be more proactive with pond management, thereby improving water quality and reducing risk. The application has been tested on a prominent Australian prawn farm.