An autonomous robotic system for collecting garbage over small water bodies

Water pollution is a grave problem requiring utmost attention as it directly affects marine lives. In freshwater ecosystem, for example, lakes and ponds, a major chunk of water garbage is plastic floating on the surface of water which is labor intensive to collect manually. In this paper, we present a novel autonomous robotic system capable of navigating small water bodies and is equipped with computer vision that helps it to detect the garbage. The detection is followed by focusing on an area of interest to determine whether the garbage lies in the scope of robot for collection. Additionally, if WiFi communication is available, the robot has the provision of tracking the detected garbage to determine its path. The design of garbage collection unit of the robot ensures the garbage does not move outward once collected. The robot is tested in two different pools and with plastic bottles as main type of garbage. The results manifest the high degree of control of its locomotion as well as of detection and collection of the bottles. The deep neural network based detector onboard the robot can be retrained after self-collection of appropriate data to detect other types of garbage as well.