SBIR Phase II: Sonar Arrays for Maximizing Aquaculture Yields

The broader impact of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project improves cultivation practices for shrimp aquaculture. Within the field of fisheries and marine ecology, shrimp is often reduced to a prey species for more commercially valuable stocks. The proposed technology improves financial security for shrimp farmers, ensures food security, and reduces pressure on wild stocks. The proposed project provides standardized real-time estimates of shrimp biomass and behavior across regions. With robust processing, this produces a well-integrated system for aquaculture monitoring. While lab experiments are valued for understanding shrimp growth and development in a controlled setting, they too are limited, with aquaculture research being the least robust and available. The controlled setting that aquaculture offers research is an untapped resource because the data are not standardized across ponds, regions, or countries. By providing a mechanism for data standardization the proposed platform contributes valuable data to the scientific community working in wild fisheries and in aquaculture, and informs aquaculture practice beyond research. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.