About the Technology
Aquaculture in the United States currently has three primary needs:
1. To expand scale
2. To increase productivity.
3. And to move operations further offshore into deeper waters.
AI–CTEC believes our AUTODIVE® technology can address all three of these needs by solving critical buoyancy and depth control challenges!
Our patented underwater technologies can identify and control the depth of aquaculture structures in real-time. In short, we replace manual operations with cost-effective automation to simplify processes and reduce operating expenses.
We expect our AUTODIVE® Depth Control Engine to become the dominant player in the aquaculture industry, given its ability to allow farmers to move offshore, increase scale, and protect crops from predators, parasites, and bad weather.
Oceans are a more than $24-trillion asset, and AI Control Technologies is working hard to help marine farmers take advantage of that asset!
Our Technology Benefits
- Moves crops to more nutrient-rich areas or away from threats.
- Eliminates the need for ropes and buoy lines.
- Allows farming practices to be executed autonomously via artificial intelligence and machine learning.
- Increases operation scale and productivity
- Improves safety for workers
- Decreases the impacts of surface predation
- Lowers risk of entanglements and injuries to endangered species
- Lowers farm-to-market costs
- Works with a variety of seafood crops.
How It Works:
Oysters
Traditional oyster production requires farmers to manually flip caged oyster grow-out bags to emulate daily tides and desiccation, increasing risk of personal injury, reducing productivity, and simply creating unnecessary costs. AI-CTEC has already begun implementing our game-changing, oyster cage-compatible solution in the Gulf of Mexico to help improve efficiencies and lower costs by optimizing processes for feeding, desiccating, wintering, and harvesting.
Mussels
Mussels are a key environmentally friendly crop for food consumption. AI-CTEC has started using our technology to provide suspended rope platforms for mussels, owed in-part to a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Our solution enables farmers to take advantage of nutrient-rich waters while avoiding disrupting waves – ultimately allowing growers to move further offshore and expand their farms.
Seaweed
We envision implementing our AUTODIVE® depth control technology into seaweed operations, as well – both as a solo biofuel crop and as part of integrated multi-species crops. Our depth control solutions will allow seaweed farmers to more efficiently and effectively control seaweed rope depths and take advantage of critical light-penetrating zones and nutrient streams.
Fin Fish
Our smart buoyancy control allows farmers to control fin fish pens and nets remotely from either a boat or the shore. This safe and cost-effective technology frees farmers to move further offshore into colder, deeper, cleaner waters. Our solution can be used either with fin fish-only crops or as part of Integrated Multi-Trophic Aquaculture (IMTA) practices.
THE FUTURE OF AI CONTROL TECH
AI Control Technologies is focused on bringing a working autonomous farming platform to various sectors of the aquaculture industry – ranging from shellfish like oysters and mussels to seaweed and fin fish. Our goal is to ease the burden of labor-intensive, repetitive farming processes with artificial intelligence (AI) and automation to help increase growth, minimize farm-to-market costs, and maximize profitability.
After extensive interviews with aquaculture farmers and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) employees, we discovered three main opportunities:
1. A need for the U.S. to expand aquaculture to an industrial scale.
2. A need to increase aquaculture productivity.
3. And a need to move the aquaculture industry further offshore.
AI-CTEC is addressing these challenges by providing automated local and remote (shore-based) monitoring and control that can vertically move farm structures in response to challenges (wave heights, tidal streams, shipping traffic, weather patterns, hurricanes, etc.), thereby increasing safety and operator efficiency, protecting farm structures, and preventing crop damage or complete loss.
Contact us today for investment and research opportunities.