AI driven underwater tech set to boost NZ mussel industry by $80Mn

University of Canterbury engineers led by our Co-Chair South Island Professor Richard Green are trialling autonomous underwater robots that scan mussel lines in 3-D, use computer vision to size shellfish and flag pests—all without sending divers overboard. Early modelling suggests the tech could lift Greenshell™ mussel yields by NZ $80 million a year, helping the sector hit the Government’s NZ$1 billion target under the Aquaculture Strategy 2035.

For New Zealand’s AI research community this is a textbook “AI + hardware” moon-shot: rugged maritime robotics, real-time ML inference, and data pipelines that flow straight into on-farm decision support.

If you’re working on edge ML, underwater sensing or blue-economy analytics, here’s your call to collaborate.

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