Fish Farming Robot: From Hitra's Net Pen to ABB

A fish farming robot has to work in cold salt water, on nets that move with the waves, next to fish that must not be hurt. This post looks at how fish were farmed before machines, from walled ponds to the first Norwegian sea cage in 1970, then at what robots do on farms now, cleaning nets, watching fish through cameras and helping with harvest. It ends with where ABB robots fit, which today is mostly the processing side on land, and what still has to be solved before pens far offshore can run with few people on site.

A floating salmon pen near Svolvær in Lofoten, Norway, 2019. Photo: Diego Delso / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From walled fish ponds to Norway's first salmon cage

People farmed fish long before anyone thought of salmon cages. Native Hawaiians built walled saltwater ponds along the coast, and the Kaloko fishpond on the island of Hawaii is still there, now part of a national historical park. A wall of stone closed off part of the sea, and fish were kept inside until they were big enough to eat. Building and repairing the walls was hard manual labour, and so was netting the fish at harvest time.

Aerial view of the walled Kaloko fishpond on the island of Hawaii. Photo: NPS via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Salmon farming began in the hatchery. Fertilization trials for Atlantic salmon took place in Germany in 1763, and biologists in Scotland and France refined the method. By the 19th century, salmon hatcheries were running in Europe and North America. Photos of hatcheries from around 1910 show long rows of wooden troughs fed with running water, where staff tended eggs and young fish by hand. Floating sea cages, where salmon are grown all the way to market size, only appeared in Norway in the late 1960s.

Inside a fish hatchery in California, around 1910, with rows of rearing troughs. Photo: California Historical Society via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The modern industry began in Norway. On 28 May 1970, on the island of Hitra, brothers Ove and Sivert Grøntvedt stocked a floating open net pen with salmon that grew into the first successful generation of farmed Atlantic salmon. Farms in Norway and Scotland spread from there. A typical sea cage is a mesh net framed with steel or plastic, 10 to 32 metres across and about 10 metres deep. For years, cleaning meant lifting the nets out of the sea and drying them in the wind and sun.

Round sea cages at a fish farm in Torskefjorden, Senja, Norway, 2014. Photo: Ximonic (Simo Räsänen) / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Net cleaning robots, AI cameras and ABB on the processing line

Feeding was one of the first jobs to be automated. Feed barges moored next to the pens now hold the pellets and blow them out through pipes, so staff do not throw feed by hand. The biggest step so far is Ocean Farm 1, an offshore pen SalMar had built in China and towed to Norway in 2017. It is 110 metres wide and 68 metres high, holds 250,000 cubic metres of water, and uses about 20,000 sensors to monitor and feed up to 1.5 million fish. It also has a revolving gate that turns 360 degrees, used to clean the nets and to herd the fish.

An Akvamaster feed barge at a fish farm in Troms, Norway. Photo: Marius Fiskum / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

Nets are the job robots took over next. Algae and shellfish grow on the mesh, cut the water flow and add weight, and high pressure cleaning is labour intensive and stressful for the fish. The Norwegian company Probotic runs an autonomous robot that cleans and inspects net pens, working mostly in the top five metres where fouling is worst, with an operations centre watching. For inspection, farms in Norway, Chile and elsewhere also lower small remotely operated vehicles over the side to film the nets.

Workers prepare a remotely operated vehicle over a net at a fish farm in Chile, 2020. Photo: Anthony Tilmins / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Cameras and AI are now spreading to harvest. On 1 September 2026 Ace Aquatec launched A-HARVESTCAM, which counts and weighs salmon during harvest and feeds that data back to its underwater biomass cameras; Scottish Sea Farms, Aquascot and several Chilean farms already use it. In South Korea, the National Institute of Fisheries Science put out a tender in August to develop a fish farm management robot. ABB robots work after the harvest: the IRB 390 FlexPacker packs food trays, and our post on seafood processing robots shows how the same tools handle fish.

An ABB IRB 390 FlexPacker packing meat trays at Torfresma in Brazil. Photo: ABB

What offshore pens will need from robots next

Farms are moving into rougher water. Ocean Farm 1 sits in Frohavet off the coast of Trøndelag, and other countries want to follow. In September, New Zealand was weighing an offshore aquaculture law after its Ministry for Primary Industries sketched a scenario of 450,000 tonnes of farmed salmon. The further out a pen is, the harder and more expensive it is to send boats and divers. That pushes farmers toward robots that can clean nets, check moorings and remove dead fish on their own, with people in a control room on shore instead of on a boat.

Farmed salmon net pens in a sheltered bay in Chile, 2009. Photo: Sam Beebe / Ecotrust via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

ABB does not build robots for the pens themselves, and we know of no ABB fish farm project. Where ABB fits is the wet, cold processing hall next to the harbour. The IRB 1300 is offered with Foundry Plus 2 protection, rated IP67 against water and dust, which suits rooms that are washed down every shift. A cell like that, gutting or packing fish, would normally be planned and checked in RobotStudio before it is installed on a real line.

An ABB IRB 1300 with Foundry Plus 2 protection, rated IP67 against water and dust. Photo: ABB

The open problems are mostly about the sea. Saltwater corrodes metal, waves and currents push robots around, and cameras have to see through water crowded with fish. Cost is another hurdle, because small farms cannot buy a fleet of robots, which is why Probotic rents its cleaning robot as a service. Farm workers also need new skills, moving from boat work to running robots and data screens. On land, picking software such as ABB PickMaster, which uses a camera to find irregular pieces on a moving belt, already handles the kind of variation that fish bring.

Setting up a picking job on a touch panel with ABB PickMaster Lite. Photo: ABB

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