Improving fish welfare through automated ike and shinkei-jime robotics 

Year: 2021

Saif Khawaja 
University of Pennsylvania, USA

Supervisor: Mr Arun Kirubarajan 

HSA Student/Trainee Scholarship 2021

Most wild-caught fish are slaughtered via asphyxiation, which is a major animal welfare issue. This roduces significant amounts of stress hormones and lactic acid, which also significantly reduces shelf-life and eventually waste — 1.2 billion pounds of fish are caught every day, yet as little as 1 in 3 fish make it to a plate. The ike-jime and shinkei-jime methods have demonstrated significant potential to increase welfare during the end-of-life experience; however, previously they have been difficult to scale because of the variation among fish. Partial mechanical automation of the techniques has been deployed in farm contexts where fish species and form are predictable. Our aim was to use novel robotics techniques to deploy automated ike-jime to generalize the techniques to a multitude of species at once. We developed a gantry system that could move in 3 dimensions and a custom-built computer vision to deploy an automated ike-jime machine. The machine was deployed for testing in a technical pilot that made use of dead, whole commercial black sea bass. After testing and as next steps, we have pilots planned with commercial fishermen to deploy smaller versions of the machine after our next iterations.