With the global population on the rise, there is an increased demand for seafood, underscoring the crucial role of aquaculture. In the realm of aquaculture, oyster farming is relatively low maintenance, except for the challenge of manually flipping heavy oyster-laden bags. To address this issue, MIT Sea Grant introduces the Oystermaran, an autonomous catamaran specifically designed for this task.
A critical aspect of achieving autonomy is the robust localization of oyster baskets. For my thesis, I am developing a feature matching-based oyster detection system. I'm using SuperGlue as my feature-matcher, in combination with a template matching scheme to robustly detect and track oyster baskets. Check out this demo of my oyster basket detection from our field testing data!
Last year, Daniel Klahn and I created the initial autonomy system for the Oystermaran. We presented our perception and controls system at the Oceans Conference in Limerick in June 2023.