SEACLEAR media kit

Brief description

The problem

The SEACLEAR system

About the team

Funding

Quotes

“Coastal waters all over the world are polluted with litter, such as pieces of plastic, bottles or tyres. At the moment, divers are cleaning up this waste from the seabed, especially in tourist areas. However, this is an expensive solution and can sometimes pose dangers for divers. That’s why we’ve joined forces with seven other partners in the SEACLEAR project to develop an autonomous system using underwater robots to remove waste from the seabed. And important to say, we are careful not to affect life on the seabed.” 

“The SEACLEAR system works as follows: We have a  surface vessel on the water and two underwater robots. The somewhat smaller robot is the observation robot. It scans the seabed with a camera and sonar. This robot maps out where the litter is located and what kind of waste it is. The robot can also distinguish between litter and aquatic life, such as fish and seaweed. We use advanced algorithms to make this distinction.

Once the observation robot has identified litter, it sends this information to the other underwater robot, which is equipped with a gripper. This robot goes to the litter and picks it up with the gripper and deposits it into a large basket. The gripper is designed with a frame structure so fish can easily escape when being picked up by accident.”

Photos

Components

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  SeaCAT

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  Tortuga

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  Mini Tortuga in the water

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  DJI Matrice M210

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  Gripper Prototype Test

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  Collection Basket Underwater

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  LARS Mini Tortuga 2

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  Tortuga with the gripper

System

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  SeaClear system

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  Concept Explanation

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  First Litter Grabbed

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  Gripper collecting litter

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  Monitoring Device

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  SEACLEAR Team

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  SEACLEAR system explanation

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  SeaCat with all the components

Videos

Who talks about us

• Horizon, The EU Research and Innovation Magazine — How robots and bubbles could soon help clean up underwater litter
  

• New Atlas — SEACLEAR project aims to robo-garbage-pick the ocean floor
  

• Interesting Engineering — Clearing the Seabed of Plastic with Autonomous Robots
  

• Springwise — Autonomous drones and vehicles collect rubbish from ocean floor
  

• Bild —  Roboter sammeln Müll im Meer
  

• New Scientist — Delftse onderwaterrobots vissen zwerfvuil van de zeebodem

• National Geographic — Cercetătorii din Cluj lucrează la primul sistem robotic de curățare a deșeurilor de pe fundul oceanului
  

• ... and many others

Press contact

General contact

A robotic system intended to clean litter from the seafloor has passed its first real-life tests in waters near Dubrovnik, Croatia. The cleaning system, which works similarly to home robot vacuums, was able to see waste on the bottom of the sea and move towards it. A plastic bottle became the first official litter to be picked up from the seabed. This series of tests is a small step in humanity’s goal of cost-effectively cleaning the seafloor, where more than 90% of the sea garbage is found.

SeaClear — picking up the first litter from the seafloor

A larger image can be found here

The waste clearing system consists of underwater robots, a surface vessel and drones working together. First, the underwater robots and the drones use sensor data and artificial intelligence to locate and identify litter on the seafloor. When litter is detected, an underwater robot equipped with a gripper is sent to collect the waste. The system has been in development for the past two years by the European-funded SeaClear project (SEarch, identificAtion and Collection of marine Litter with Autonomous Robots) that joins together researchers and industry from five countries.

 This October, three key components of the system were tested in a real water environment: the underwater inspection robot, a gripper prototype, and an aerial drone. “We went to a tourist area in Croatia, Lokrum Island near Dubrovnik, which is one of the first places we want to clean once the SeaClear system is fully operational”, says professor Bart De Schutter, from Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands, who leads the project. “The main star of the test was the underwater inspection robot. We wanted to see whether it’s able to detect and move towards the litter in various water conditions”, explains De Schutter.

SeaClear — Underwater inspection robot

A larger image can be found here

 The first live test resulted in the first official litter being picked up from the water by the SeaClear robot: a plastic bottle! This happened during the test at a second location, also close to Dubrovnik, Croatia, but with less clear water. The team tested a 3D printed prototype of its newly designed gripper, to identify weak spots in the design and operation under real-life conditions and indeed, it broke. However, to have a proof-of-concept, the researchers were able to repurpose an existing, sturdier gripper, and managed to successfully pick up litter underwater.

 The test was also important for the software part of the project. “The concept is simple on paper and not unlike our home robot vacuum cleaners”, says professor Lucian Bușoniu, from Technical University Cluj, Romania, who is leading the litter-search part of the project. “However, the complexity of robot positioning and control, as well as of litter identification and collection, is much higher and makes the objectives much more difficult to achieve. We wanted to test out our concept and we now need to go through all the data sets from our cameras, the sonar and the robot positioning sensors. This will help improve our software.”

 A completely autonomous robotic system for sea litter cleaning would be a vital and cheap solution to one of the largest environmental problems our planet is facing. Today's oceans contain 26-66 million tons of waste, such as pieces of plastic, bottles or tyres. The waste that we see at the surface represents a mere 6% of the total, the rest is resting at the bottom. Tourist resorts and port authorities currently resort to divers to clean up this waste from the seabed, sometimes at the cost of their safety.

 “For example, in September 2020, a human-only marine litter clean-up that took place in the same test area close to Lokrum Island, resulted in 17 divers collecting more than 88 kg of waste from the seafloor in a one-hour period”, said Iva Pozniak, principal investigator for Regional Agency Dunea, Croatia. When completed, the SeaClear system should achieve similar results with minimal human intervention.

SeaClear is a European Horizon 2020 project that was launched on 1 January 2020. It runs until December 2023. The total budget is approximately EUR 5 million. There are eight partners from five countries and 49 researchers involved.

The eight partners are: TU Delft, Hamburg Port Authority, TU Cluj-Napoca, Subsea Tech, TU Munich, Fraunhofer CML, University of Dubrovnik and DUNEA.

Further information

A more detailed and technical description of how the system works is available here.

Images:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1buVA-u3_OVMi5kOLSaq52boT_jnqYM9g

Video:

February 2024: SeaClear: The Robots are Ready to Clean the Ocean

December 2022: Announcing SEACLEAR 2.0

May 2022: Fighting plastic waste: SEACLEAR tests in the port of Hamburg

November 2021: First successful tests of novel robotic system for cleaning sea floor litter

June 2021: World Ocean's day

World Ocean Day: Autonomous robot system picks up litter from ocean floor

TU Delft is working with seven other partners on an autonomous system for cleaning the ocean floor. This system consists of a surface vehicle with two underwater robots, which are going to identify and collect litter from the ocean floor. Now that the crucial gripper component of the system has been completed, the SeaClear system is almost ready for field testing.

Waste problem

‘Coastal waters all over the world are polluted with litter, such as pieces of plastic, bottles or tyres. At the moment divers are cleaning up this waste from the seabed, especially in tourist areas. However, this is an expensive solution and can sometimes pose dangers for divers,’ says professor Bart De Schutter from TU Delft’s Center for Systems and Control. ‘That’s why we’ve joined forces with seven other partners in the SeaClear project to develop an autonomous system using underwater robots to remove waste from the seabed. And important to say, we are careful not to affect life on the seabed.’

Two underwater robots

‘The SeaClear system works as follows,’ continues project leader De Schutter. ‘We have a surface vessel on the water and two underwater robots. The somewhat smaller robot is the observation robot. It scans the seabed with a camera and sonar. This robot maps out where the litter is located and what kind of waste it is. Once the observation robot has identified litter, it sends this information to the other underwater robot, which is equipped with a gripper. This robot goes to the litter and picks it up with the gripper and deposits it into a large basket. The gripper is designed with a frame structure so fish can easily escape when being picked up by accident. The robot can also distinguish between litter and aquatic life, such as fish and seaweed. We use advanced algorithms to make this distinction.’

Delft

TU Delft is the project coordinator of SeaClear, taking care of the overall management and coordination of the different work packages. In addition, TU Delft is making a significant scientific contribution to the project. This contribution is threefold: first, it concerns image recognition and the classification of the waste. Second, it concerns sensor fusion: the waste can be observed by means of sonar or video. Sonar has to be used when visibility is poor, such as in the Port of Hamburg, which is one of the two test sites. ‘We can combine the data from the video images with the sonar images. Video images are already labelled, but this kind of data is not yet labelled in the case of sonar data. That’s why we want to transfer labelled data from video images to labelled data for sonar.’ Finally, Delft University is focusing on the movements of the various underwater vehicles, which are connected to the base vessel by cables for the transfer of data and power. It’s important that these cables do not get tangled up. ‘This will definitely be a priority once we start to scale up the system,’ De Schutter explains.

First tests in Dubrovnik

‘The gripper was the trickiest hardware component to develop, but that’s ready now too. Researchers of TU Munich have constructed a prototype, so now we can really start testing the whole system,’ De Schutter says. ‘We have two test sites: one in Dubrovnik and another in the Port of Hamburg. In September, we’ll carry out the first tests, in Dubrovnik. We’ll test the different components of the system and see if we can automatically recognise and pick up litter that we have placed on the seabed ourselves.’

Bart de Schutter: “We would like to expand SeaClear significantly in the future. This means we want to move towards scaling the system up with a large number of underwater robots that can be used anywhere. That would enable us to scan a huge area and really clean up the ocean.”

SeaClear is a European project that was launched on 1 January 2020. It runs until December 2023. The total budget is approximately EUR 5 million. There are eight partners from six countries and 49 researchers involved.

The eight partners are: TU Delft, Hamburg Port Authority, TU Cluj-Napoca, Subsea Tech, TU Munich, Fraunhofer CML, Dubrovnik University and DUNEA.

We currently have an open position for a Postdoc at the University of Dubrovnik:

Postdoc in autonomous systems

The ideal candidate(s) should have a PhD in control systems, electrical engineering, machine learning or robotics, have excellent coding skills (C++/python/ROS/git) and passion for control and machine learning methods. Excellent written and oral communication and organizational skills as well as English proficiency are required.

The successful candidate will:

• Develop novel control and learning algorithms tailored to real-world robotic learning problems,
• Formulate and implement robotic test scenarios on existing robotic platforms;
• Experimentally assess and analyze the performance of algorithms on physical robotic platforms in relation to the state of the art; and
• Participate in research meetings, travel to partner institutions, and undertake supplementary research methods training.

More details

Projects - Networks - Organisations

• eSEA Marine
• The Ocean Cleanup
• International Union for Conservation of Nature
• Environmental and Energy Study Institute
• European Robotics Network
• The German Ocean Foundation
• United Nations Environment Programme
• International Solid Waste Association - Marine Task Force
• Plastics Europe
• Operation Clean Sweep
• Ocean Technology Campus Rostock

Relevant reports

• IUCN report - Over 200,000 tonnes of plastic leaking into the Mediterranean each year
• UN Sustainable Development Goals - Oceans: Marine Pollution
• Marine Litter: Time to Clean up our Act
• Marine Litter Study to support the establishment of an initial quantitative headline
• Surfers Against Sewage - Marine Litter Report
• ISWA Marine Task Force - Marine Litter Report

Scientific Advisory Board

Technical Advisory Board