Just three meters long, Clearbot Neo uses a solar battery-powered electric motor to systematically skim the surface and scoops up floating trash, all while relying on AI tech to recognize and log the types of waste it collects and where.

This ingenious machine is designed by computer engineers Sidhant Gupta and Utkarsh Goel; the duo got the inspiration from a trip to the Indonesian vacation island of Bali, where they witnessed local workers take out small boats to remove waste from the waters manually. Soon afterward, they developed a basic aluminum prototype in Bali, followed by a fiberglass version. Then the team collaborated with a gaming hardware brand Razer to redesign its intelligent robots, equipping them with the right tools.

Clearbot Neo can be remotely controlled or operated autonomously, using a LiDAR to avoid obstacles. Its battery provides enough juice to keep it working for up to 4 hours, while its collection capacity is 200 kg (about 440 lb).

Once the floating trash is detected, the robot will scoop it up to feed its onboard conveyor belt, fitted near the bow between its dual hulls and into a holding bin near its stern.

According to the company, the Clearbot can bring in as much as a metric ton of waste per day for recycling or disposal. When fitted with a bespoke boom, it can also tackle localized oil and fuel spills by collecting up to 15 liters of pollutants a day.

Beyond trash, the boat also collects a ton of data using a two-camera detection system. One camera surveys the water’s surface so the bot can identify rubbish and avoid marine life, navigational hazards, and other vessels, while the second one photographs each piece of plastic waste that makes its way onto the conveyor. These images are tagged with a GPS location and saved to the company’s database hosted on Microsoft’s Azure platform for subsequent analysis.

Initial data analysis has found that only 20% to 40% of the marine plastic recovered in Hong Kong cleanup operations can go on to be recycled. Such information, together with variables like sea current and tide information, could help environmentalists and marine authorities to identify the sources of the trash.

“We’re finding out how the trash ends up in the water in the first place,” says Clearbot Neo’s co-creator Sidhant Gupta. “It adds a lot of transparency to the process of marine cleanup. We generate data about what’s actually in the water, what’s the make-up of the stuff that’s there, how much of it is recyclable, and what materials we should be focusing on.”

These days, Clearbot Neo creators are scaling up and are looking to have fleets of Clearbot Neos cleaning up and protecting waters around the globe.

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One such robot, called BeachBot or BB, is designed to pick up cigarette butts on beaches. Designed by two Dutch engineers, Edwin Bos and Martijn Lukaart of TechTics, it looks like a moon rover with added arms to pick up those nasty butts.

Why cigarette butts, you ask? For one thing they look ugly on the beach; and second – they contain microplastics and chemicals harmful to fish and other sea creatures.

Specs wise, Beachbot is 2.5-feet (80 cm) wide, has puffy tires that won’t leave tire prints on the sand, and the pair of grasping arms to pick up those toxic butts on the beachfront.

Its key selling point, however, is the AI-enabled software that uses 2 cameras and relies on image-processing algorithms to discern a cigarette butt from people and other beach equipment like flip-flops, towels, and larger chunks of trash.

BeachBot then scoops the cigarette butts up from the sand and disposes of them in an internal bin. Later, people empty that bin into a trash container.

As of July 2021, BeachBot’s brain is learning to discern butts of all shapes, sizes, and forms using the Microsoft Trove app. The app connects AI developers with photos sent by contributors to feed the system with images of cigarette butts stuck in the sand. In the future, it may be expanded to scoop up other pieces of trash, as well.

The company is looking to amass upwards of 2,000 images and will pay contributors for their entries.

It is also worth pointing out that BeachBot doesn’t do all the work alone. Rather, it has a trove of more miniature robots that are meant to map or scan the beach for cigarette butts before BB goes to work.

BeachBot made its debut at the World Cleanup Day at Scheveningen Beach, when it managed to clean up ten butts in half an hour. That’s rather slow, but it’s only the start as BB is expected to speed up as it learns. Also, in theory, it can work 24/7 taking the rest only when its battery needs to be charged — after which the beach sweeping can continue.

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One of the robots, Flir FirstLook, is designed to crawl through tight spaces that are dangerous or otherwise impossible for humans to reach. At the size of a brick, it can even be thrown into areas that are hard to reach, where they will then use their wheels to search the rubble. If the robot lands upside down, it has the capability to right itself.

FirstLook robots weigh approximately 2.2 kg and are built to withstand drops of approximately 5 meters, even when dropped on hard surfaces such as concrete. The robots feature thermal sensors, cameras, and two-way radios in order to relay information back to search and rescue operatives.

A different robot, called PackBot 510, has a servo-arm that can move loads weighing around 40 pounds (18 kg). It weighs 50 pounds (22.6 kg) and can be stored in a car trunk and deployed within two minutes.

PackBot 510 is intended to be used to dispose of bombs, perform surveillance and reconnaissance, and handle chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear agents and other hazardous materials.

Both PackBot and FirstLook are semi-autonomous robots, which means they need an operator present during their search.

Also both have been tested following the devastating collapse of a condo in Miami, Florida on June 24, 2021.

“In a collapse situation like this, the pile is structurally unsound and constantly vulnerable to shifting. It’s much safer to have a robot crawl deeper into a void than to have a person crawling into that void,” Tom Frost, Teledyne Flir’s vice president of unmanned ground systems, told The Washington Post at the time.

Teledyne Flir was formed after aerospace electronics firm Teledyne Technologies acquired Flir, a 42-year-old software company for $8 billion. The merged companies develop technologies predominantly for the military, space exploration, and for the deep sea.

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Designed by the French company IADYS, it is a remote-controlled electric-powered boat capable of collecting floating waste and oil from the surface of the water into a net that it trails behind its twin hulls. The suitcase-sized vehicle can get into the corners and narrow spaces where rubbish tends to accumulate but which are difficult for cleaners with nets to reach.

The trash-collecting robot collects everything in its path, from plastic waste, glass to natural waste and floating algae. It can also collect all types of hydrocarbons such as oils, diesel, kerosene and gasoline.

Jellyfishbot is powered by three electric thrusters, walks at a speed of 2 knots (3.7 km/h), and can work for 6-8 hours on a single charge — depending on the use. It can be remote-controlled from up to 400 meters (1300 ft) away. The 18 kg machine can clean 1,000 square-meter area per hour at 1 knot (1.8 km/h) and trap up to 80 liters of micro-waste in its net. The nets can contain up to 30 liters of hydrocarbons.

The user has remote access to video on a smartphone using an onboard camera throughout the mission. When the net fills up, the operator can then command the robot to return to its starting point where the waste can be removed and the net emptied. The vehicle will also be able to detect obstacles and collect waste autonomously.

Beyond marines, Jellyfishbot can also be used for the decontamination of other difficult to access aquatic areas such as ports, lakes, canals, as well as leisure centers, hotel residences, and industrial facilities.

The handy trash-eating robot is in operation in around 15 French ports and has been exported to several countries worldwide, including Norway, Switzerland and Japan.

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To that end, 4Ocean has partnered with Poralu Marine, a global leader in marine-grade technologies, to launch a beach cleaning robot designed to recover coastal plastic debris. Called BeBot, the solar-powered robot is specifically designed to help clean up smaller plastic waste.

The robot, according to the company, is needed because the shores are currently so polluted that it would be almost impossible to clean it with human work alone. In addition to the larger pieces of trash like plastic water bottles or food packaging, there is a lot of small waste that is hard for humans to notice — such as smaller packages, cigarette butts, and microplastics.

The electric-powered BeBot is able to clean up to 3,000 sqm of beach per hour, which is said to be 20-30 times more efficient than collecting trash on the beach by hand. Agile and easy to maneuver, the robot specifically excels at removing small pieces of plastic and other trash that are notoriously difficult to clean by hand, using small 1×1 cm sifting grids to separate these items from the sand.

The BeBot’s smaller footprint and more shallow cleaning depth of 10 cm effectively remove common beach trash while avoiding disruptions to any nearby habitats or animals — thus providing for a sustainable approach to cleanups. The robot is remotely operated, can be used daily, and is controlled by an operator up to approximately 950 feet (300 meters) away. It runs on batteries connected to a solar panel and is said to be quiet enough not to disturb wildlife or beachgoers.

After the machine is full, someone needs to sort through the contents to separate recyclable plastic and trash from materials that can return to the sand.

The BeBot is part of 4Ocean’s goal of eliminating 20 million pounds of waste by the end of 2021.

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The company tested the production version of the technology on the aircraft of Swiss regional carrier Helvetic Airways a month before, in partnership with Dubai-based air services provider dnata.

During the cleaning process, an autonomous sterilization robot emits concentrated UV-C light, which has been used for 50 years to clean hospitals and laboratories.

UVeya claims that its device can effectively kill more than 99% of bacteria and pathogens, such as coronavirus, in the air and on all surfaces in a few minutes, without using any chemicals.

“We are thrilled to explore the aviation market for our UVC disinfection solution with such renowned partners. We believe this collaboration will help assure aircraft are clean, safe and up to the high-level standards of this industry,” Tristan Chevignard, business development manager of UVeya, said at the time when the trial was announced.

The company is now working with airlines and train companies on the use case, and looking for investors to deploy the solution at large scale.

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Enter Trombia Tech, a Finnish road maintenance equipment manufacturer known for its cutting-edge innovation for dust and snow clearing technologies. They have been keeping up with the times and now their Trombia Free street sweeper is autonomously cleaning the streets in Finland.

Boasting a modern design, Trombia Free is 3.52 m long, 2.3 m wide, and weighs around 2,600 kg. It is also quiet, making it possible to sweep the streets at night, hindering traffic as little as possible.

For regular street cleaning operations, Trombia Free’s battery can work for between 8.5 and 17 hours per charge or between 4 and 8 hours for continuous high-power street cleaning.

The first commercial pilot program of this fancy robot was launched in March 2021 in the City of Espoo with the goal to “kick start the era of greener and more sustainable city cleaning.”

“When we think about the over 3 million CO2 metric tons of carbon emissions that high power diesel-fueled suction street sweepers around the world produce annually, we see that smart cities around the world can act to reduce their energy consumption and carbon emissions significantly by modernizing the way street cleaning is made,” Trombia’s CEO Antti Nikkanen said at the time of the pilot announcement.

Trombia Free cleaning devices use less than 15% of the power required by currently available heavy suction sweeping technologies. As a result, the company promises to help cities take down the power requirements dramatically without compromising the quality and effectiveness.

Moreover, Trombia Free units are equipped with an all-weather autonomous, LiDAR-based, machine vision technology that filtrates the noise coming from the environment in rainy, snowy or alternative conditions. The advanced algorithm can absorb data on objects from various sources while generating millions of illustrations of the object at once. This enables accurate and safe localization in all-weather conditions.

During the pilot period in Mankkaa, Espoo, autonomous functions and machine vision were tested, as well as different ways to integrate the autonomous sweeper with other logistics.

Additional Trombia Free pilot programs are planned for the rest of 2021, including the one in Helsinki which has already started. Also, the company plans to test out its offering with heavy industrial sites where they think Trombia Free could deliver effective, autonomous and carbon free cleaning.

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And they are obviously onto something, with the EPA estimating that U.S. investments in wastewater networks will need to increase by over $150 billion over the next two decades to maintain current services. Many of the companies providing these services have pipes one hundred feet underground that have never been inspected.

To make this possible, RedZone offers a few robots, made to fit different pipe sizes. According to the company’s CEO, what they’re doing is a perfect application for robotics as inspecting wastewater pipes is “dirty, dull, and dangerous.”

Redzone’s robots are designed to be dropped into one manhole and find their way to the next one for collection. They carry cameras, laser, lidar, sonar, and hydrogen sulfide gas sensors which can corrode pipes. A combination of data from all these sensors is used to build a model of the pipe’s interior and identify, for example, which pipes have the most corrosion.

From that point on, Redzone’s analytics platform kicks in to provide insights into which pipes have to be replaced and which could be refurbished.

The company says that its inspection robots are cost-effective and even in cases when the cost of the inspection is similar to existing methods — when inspecting larger pipes — the data acquired is much richer. Also, their method is faster than conventional inspections.

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Designed to provide users with the experience of being in a meeting without actually going there, GoBe Robots are remotely controlled enabling a “distinct feeling” of being where the robot is as they receive live video streams of the location as the robot moves around it. This further enables active collaboration and interaction between people, no matter how far they are from each other.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, GoBe Robots have also emerged as an effective tool in breaking down chains of infection, preventing the spread of coronavirus and other diseases and overcoming closed borders — while reducing travel budgets, working hours and transport time.

“During the global virus epidemic, we have seen significant growth in orders,” Peter Juhl Voldsgaard, CEO of GoBe Robots, said at the time of the next-gen product announcement. “Telepresence robots have now become a standard technology that everyone can understand. The experience our technology gives of almost being there in person is unique. We’re now taking that experience to the next level.”

The new GoBe Robots telepresence robot allows communication through a 21.5-inch screen that reproduces the user’s face in natural size. A zoomable 4K camera and a wide-angle front camera give the “robot pilot” a clear overview of the location the GoBe robot discovers. This robot also stands out with an open system that creates even more applications and allows users to maximize the potential of the technology. For example, trade show organizers can give remote attendees the ability to book themselves directly into the telepresence robot and experience booths and events while engaging with exhibitors.

As of mid-2020, GoBe Robots had more than 150,000 existing users of its telepresence robots, which contribute to colossal CO2 reductions. As an example, a trip from Copenhagen to Singapore emits approx. 3.1 ton of CO2 per person. Using the GoBe Robots telepresence robot for a visit to Singapore emits a fraction of CO2, even when the power consumption of streaming and server hosting is taken into account. A company in Europe with 20 employees traveling to Asia four times a year saves 500,000 kilos of CO2 by replacing air travel with the telepresence robot.

The GoBe Robot also helps sick children with access to school and peers, and it can give people with disabilities access to more places and experiences in the community such as museums and conferences. The CO2 reductions are also realized in the manufacturing sector.

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According to CO6, ReadySight streams video over dedicated first responder and commercial LTE networks. Controlled by a smartphone, it allows for “day and zero light usage,” while also enabling autonomous and semi-autonomous driving and patrolling modes, two-way audio communication, and unlimited range and usage over cellular networks.

The robot has a built-in speaker and microphone, a foldable “tail,” and a time-of-flight distance sensor. Said camera relies on Sony’s sensor with a 120-degree wide-angle lens, a lens shield and a motion sensor paired with a front indicator LED. It also has high-torque motors that are powerful enough to tackle multiple terrain types and obstacles.

ReadySight can stream to viewers on the web, with streaming plans starting at $99 per month and first responder plans starting at $149 per month. Both subscriptions include unlimited streaming via priority networks and a free replacement robot if ReadySight is lost in the line of duty.

CO6 envisions ReadySight being deployed in the course of accident investigation, exploring tight or unknown spaces before someone enters, and acting as a sentry to keep eyes on critical areas like crime scenes. The device is expected to ship in Q3 2021.

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