This Cute Autonomous Robot Can Clean Beaches With No Human Input
Even though it¡¯s still in just a prototype stage, the robot completed its first demo in September last year and it was quite successful at it -- it managed to collect 10 cigarette butts in 30 minutes.
Beaches are mesmerising and calming, but only if they¡¯re not full of trash. Indian beaches especially are full of a variety of crap, including snack wrappers, gum and of course, cigarette butts.
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However, engineers have now created a robot that would do exactly that -- look for cigarette butts and put them in the trash for us.
The robot is developed by tech startup Tech Tics, lead by entrepreneurs Edwin Bos and Martijn Lukaart. Their solution is an autonomous Mars rover-like beach cleaning robot that uses AI to detect and collect cigarette butts on the beach.
The cute little rover is called BeachBot, also called BB. This robot is smart enough to not just look for cigarette butts on the beach but also partially-buried ones that are hidden in the sand. It is 80-centimetres wide and has two cameras on board that it uses to look ahead while navigating as well as down to look for cigarette butts.
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TechTics
To grab the cigarette butts, it¡¯s got two claw-like gripper arms that it lowers and pushes into the sand. Once collected, the butts are thrown in an internal bin. On a full charge, it can easily run for an hour.
The AI onboard was fed with numerous cigarette butt images taken on a beach. The company behind it, TechTics, used the Microsoft Trove app to get a good library of images shared by people. As of now it has collected 200 such photos and intends to collect around 2,000 to get more accurate.
Even though it¡¯s still in just a prototype stage, the robot completed its first demo in September last year and it was quite successful at it -- it managed to collect 10 cigarette butts in 30 minutes.
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TechTics
The idea of BB came into existence when Bos was with his two kids at a Scheveningen Beach, around 4.5 kilometres away from the Dutch coast when his son found the cigarette butt while digging into the sand. He thought about how it could have been dangerous for his kid, or any other child playing in the sand, had he put it in his mouth.
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TechTics
But this is not it for BB. TechTics are working on two more scout robots that will easily locate cigarette butts for BB to collect in its bin. Eventually, TechTics envisions running the three bots straight from solar power, which would be really cool.
