An intelligent behavior-based fish feeding system

Aquaculture is a growing multi-billion pound industry facing many challenges. Traditional fish feeding mechanism in today's aquaculture farms stands behind a variety of challenges, including fish welfare, fish growth distribution, environmental effect especially in open ocean cage fish farms, and production cost efficiency. Adaptive smart fish feeder based on fish behaviours is proposed in this paper in order to minimize the effect of the traditional feeding mechanisms. The proposed feeding mechanism interacts, recognizes and responses to fish activities. The proposed smart fish feeder feeds fish based on their request regardless the time of the day. The smart fish feeding aims to minimize food waste and maximize the food conversion ratio (FCR). The proposed system is expected to cause uniform fish growth among individuals within the tank as the feeding depends on fish requests. Fish welfare is expected to be enhanced since there is no food competition and food waste is expected to be less making water good quality last for longer. This paper proposes hardware design of the smart feeder and smart software algorithm. Preliminary results will be discussed in this paper.