Autonomous marine boat starts working to clean up plastic waste

Open Ocean Engineering announced in 2020 that they have developed an autonomous garbage collector boat to collect plastic waste from ports and rivers before it enters the oceans. The company, which partnered with Razer last year, announced that they produced more functional vehicles. A new cleaning boat, called Clearbot, has started operating in Hong Kong waters.

Clean water with Clearbot

Plastic waste, which is one of the biggest factors of environmental pollution, not only harms the environment and other living things, but also poses a great danger to human health. For this reason, collecting plastic waste from the environment gains great importance and many countries are creating their own strategies in this context.

Apart from countries, private companies are also working on strategy, and as a result of one of these studies, Open Ocean Engineering announced the launch of the Clearbot they developed. The robotic garbage collector, which is 3 m long and 1.3 m wide, can also work autonomously in addition to being remotely controlled.

With a waste collection capacity of 200 kg, Clearbot offers the potential to collect one metric ton of waste per day. Equipped with LIDAR sensors, the boat can run for 4 hours on a single charge. In addition, it can clean up to 15 liters of waste per day in response to possible oil spills.

Clearbot uses an AI camera system to identify garbage and take a picture of every piece of plastic waste that makes its way to the conveyor, and images captured through the system are tagged with a GPS location and saved in the company’s database hosted on the Microsoft Azure platform for later use in analytics.

Open Ocean Engineering is looking to expand the scope of Clearbot to more countries, which started working at the local marina after successful tests in Hong Kong waters. The company says that there is a strong interest in the boat in many foreign markets.