AI-Powered Robots Will Clean Up Beaches of Trash
Beaches around the world are literally drowning in all kinds of trash, cigarette butts and waste left behind by people relaxing. Technology companies have decided to help fight this problem and have started developing robotic cleaners to collect trash from beaches. Let's take a closer look at two companies and their robots, which could change the state of beaches beyond recognition.
BeBot
Keeping beaches clean is a big job. Even the best team of dedicated cleaners can miss small pieces of plastic. If left on the beach, these plastic fragments keep breaking down into smaller pieces and end up in the stomachs of birds, turtles, fish and even people.
The French company Poralu Marine has developed a robot BeBot that collects trash on the seashore. The fully electric robot has already arrived in Florida for use on American beaches, thanks to the marine environment cleanup company 4ocean.
BeBot runs on a battery with a solar panel that powers additional accessories. The robot moves on tracks, like a tank, so it can easily glide over sand. As it roams the beach, a built-in sieve sorts plastic and other trash, leaving a clean strip of sand behind it.
The robot performs cleaning under the control of a remote operator. The developers say they chose not to make the robot autonomous for safety reasons regarding beachgoers (both people and sea turtles). BeBot and its remote control have an emergency stop button.
The device scoops up beach sand to a depth of up to 10 cm, then sifts it through its filters. Depending on the terrain, a single robot can process up to 3,000 m² of beach per hour. It can move up to 300 m away from its operator. If the trials in Florida are successful, BeBots will head to Hawaii, home to some of the most polluted beaches in the world.
BeBot is not the only environmental cleaning robot in Poralu Marine's lineup. It is part of a large family of devices called Searial Cleaners, which also includes Pixie Drone (collects both solid and liquid waste) and Invisibubble (hoses that use a constant stream of bubbles to guide floating trash to collection points).
BeBot and Searial Cleaners cannot solve the problem of marine pollution on their own, but they can at least gather valuable data on which types of trash are most common on specific beaches.
BeachBot
Since no one has been able to make humanity stop littering where it shouldn't, some people keep thinking creatively and collecting trash in unusual ways. Dutch engineers Martin Lukaart and Edwin Bos founded the company TechTics and created the robot BeachBot (abbreviated BB).
Using an artificial intelligence system from Microsoft, BB carries out its mission of ridding beaches of cigarette butts, and ultimately hopes to learn to remove other types of trash.
Microsoft and TechTics have already demonstrated a prototype robot that is still learning with the help of Trove, an AI system developed by the software giant. The system helps provide image sets for this kind of machine learning task.
Essentially, the robot needs people to learn first. On its own, the robot does not know what cigarette butts are or what they look like. With Trove, the company engaged people to submit photos to the AI system. The team then passes this knowledge to the BB robot, which with every new image gets better at understanding what to look for.
According to the company, it needs about 2,000 images of cigarette butts on a beach to help the robot fully understand what it is looking for. So far it has 200, but BB can already search for cigarette butts using two cameras. The four-wheeled robot uses its robotic arms to put butts into a basket, after which they can be disposed of properly. In addition, it can navigate around people and various objects.
BB runs on a battery and can operate for up to one hour. Currently, the robot is cleaning Scheveningen beach in The Hague. During a test run in September 2020, it collected 10 cigarette butts in 20 minutes.
According to TechTics, BB is just the beginning of this project. The company is currently working on two smaller robots so that BB has its own team of helpers. The small bots will search for cigarette butts and communicate with BB to request trash removal.
Finding a Solution
The BB robot has focused its attention on cigarette butts (at least for now), since they are the most common personal items found on beaches. The shoreline is the last barrier for trash before it enters the sea. Cigarette filters slowly poison turtles, fish and other creatures, thereby polluting the ecosystem.
The key to solving the problem is raising people's environmental awareness, but this is a very long process, and beaches need constant cleaning. That is why researchers are turning to advanced technologies, particularly artificial intelligence.
"We believe our robotic solution may not fully solve this problem, because the main cause of littering remains human behavior. We must together keep our beaches clean," said Edwin Bos, founder of TechTics.
In 2020, the Marine Strategy Coordination Group presented beach cleanliness standards, according to which 85% of the European Union's coastal areas are not considered clean.
