An underwater robot can autonomously scan large areas of seabed to identify plastic, rubber and metal rubbish using artificial intelligence image recognition. The technology will help focus the limited budgets for clean-up efforts on the most toxic and environmentally damaging materials.
and his colleagues at the Norwegian firm Skarv Technologies created a 45-kilogram underwater robot equipped with stereo cameras, while researchers at , another firm in Norway, produced a spectrometer that can identify the material an object is made of even through metres of murky water.
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The robot scours the seabed at a distance of 2 metres, tracing a methodical route up and down in rows like a tractor ploughing a field, collecting data as it goes and plotting it on a map using GPS readings.
An AI model, which was trained on 28,000 images of underwater debris that had all been accurately tagged with a description, then takes the images and data from the robot鈥檚 survey and classifies them. This information can be turned into colour-coordinated maps that are invaluable to clean-up operations.
In a bay in Bergen, Norway, called Store Lungeg氓rdsvann, the team identified a total of 3894 objects and classified them into categories: bottles, plastics, anchors, tyres, metal and other items. The group also added another category for starfish, creating the added bonus of surveying these animals in the bay.
鈥淭here鈥檚 been industry, and the city鈥檚 super old, so there鈥檚 a huge amount of trash,鈥� says Olav Fossum. 鈥淲e estimated that there鈥檚 somewhere around 150 to 300 tonnes of trash in the bay.鈥�
The problem of identification is made more difficult because objects tend to be partially embedded in the seabed, but mapping out the most dangerous material is essential to make the most of clean-up efforts by human divers, he says.
鈥淕lass isn鈥檛 really polluting 鈥� it鈥檚 inert. So if you know there鈥檚 an area with a lot of glass, you probably can exclude that from the clean-up effort and focus on things that are putting heavy metals into the environment,鈥� he says. 鈥淭here are car batteries that can be small, and then you have shipwrecks which contains all sorts of trash, and then you have unexploded ordnance from world war two.鈥�
The team will return in November to continue mapping another bay in Bergen and there are also plans for a larger survey next year.
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