Europe has created an underwater robot that promises to clean up trash from the seabed. And Spain, with its 8,000 kilometers of coastline, could be one of the most benefited countries. It’s called SEACLEAR 2.0 and it was developed by a team from the Technical University of Munich with European funding. It’s not just any submarine: the complete system includes an unmanned mother ship, a drone, a small and agile explorer robot, and the seabed-cleaning robot itself. It works like this: the ship maps the seabed with cameras and sonar, the explorer robot identifies the trash, and then the big robot descends with its eight mini-turbines, grabs the waste with a special gripper and brings it up to a launch that acts as a container.
Why is it necessary? Because marine trash is a huge problem. For example, in the city of Dubrovnik (Croatia) they counted more than a thousand pieces of trash in just one hundred square meters of port. Human divers can clean, but beyond 16 meters deep the work becomes expensive, slow and dangerous. That’s where this robot makes a difference: it reaches where people can’t go, or where it isn’t worth their going.
The project isn’t staying in the lab. Behind it are the Port Authority of Hamburg and the company Subsea Tech, which means the idea is to put it to real work. The robot not only collects trash, but also generates maps of the seabed and classifies the types of waste, helping to design better environmental policies. Good news for our seas.
— Marta, for inteligencia intermitente.
