Ashored Technologies, a new company based in Halifax, Canada, has just been accepted into the prestigious startup accelerator Masschallenge. 

Ashored is developing a bottom-bound ropeless fishing system to minimize the risk of ship entanglements and trap loss/damage, while allowing fishers to fish in zones closed to fixed fishing gear.

Ashored retrofits existing lobster and crab traps with underwater buoys that can be triggered to the surface using an active-retrieval release – this permits the buoy and connecting rope to rise to the surface where fishermen can use existing onboard equipment and processes to retrieve the trap and prepare it for redeployment. Ashored’s buoys use machine learning to collect data and make recommendations, and use sonar and geo-tracking to locate lost traps.