To accelearate the pace of our developments, and to increase the chances of success during testing, our partners from TUM are working on creating digital twins of the test sites. This is especially relevant in the context of the ongoing CoVID-19 pandemic, which makes travelling difficult which lowers the opportunities for actual testing. In collaboration with HPA, they have created a digital twin for one of our test sites in the Port of Hamburg.

The goal of the SeaClear project is to develop autonomous underwater and surface vessels for mapping, classification and collection of marine waste. Hopefully in the future, robots will be cleaning our oceans continuously, but for now, periodic ocean clean-up actions performed by divers and manned vessels remain the only option. However, to test the efficiency of the autonomous vessels being developed through the project, a baseline must be used for comparison, making monitoring the efficiency of current ocean clean-up actions essential to the project.

On the 15th and 16th of September 2021, the first tests of the SeaClear robots took place in the Dubrovnik area, Croatia. This was the first time representatives from all the partners met live after the kick-off meeting of the project, due to the on-going pandemic due to CoVID-19.

The second round of trials of the SEACLEAR system took place in the port of Hamburg between 10 and 12 of May 2022. The port of Hamburg is the second test site of the project, offering completely different conditions and challenges compared to the first test site in Dubrovnik, Croatia. Underwater visibility is considerably lower, often lower than a few centimetres, while there is heavy traffic present from commercial ships. This makes the use of vision cameras for detecting the litter unusable, with the only reliable detection alternative being sonar sensors.

During these trials we included the latest developed components of the SEACLEAR system, such as the LARS for the underwater robots, a more sturdy version of the gripping system, and the final version of the collection basket. You can get a feeling of these trials from our video and pictures below.

The event created a significant interest in the local media, and several news outlets visited the test sites to cover and report on our progress. Following the tests and media appearances, we discussed the current progress and future steps until the next meeting in Marseille, in September 2022.