It is being successfully tested in Venice and works up to 20 meters deep.
Allows you to locate, identify and recover waste for later recycling and reuse
The withdrawal of plastics that float on the surface of the sea is a common practice in almost the whole world to try to reduce the amount of this waste. But What happens to those at the bottom of the sea? The Maelstrom Project has launched in Venice and is demonstrating that it is capable of locating and collecting garbage from the seabed, recycling it and then reintroducing that material on the market for reuse.
The robot for cleaning the seabed developed by Tecnalia, which is being tested on the island of Sacca Fissola, in the Venetian Lagoon (Italy), has already collected half a ton of plastic in its experimental phase.
As reported by this technology center in a statement, it is an initiative that It goes beyond collecting waste, since its objective is to identify, collect, classify and transform marine litterto that it is collected in recycled products, as well as to evaluate the impact of these systems on the ecosystem.
On the occasion of the European Week of the Environment, the robot carried out its first live demo in the presence of the local authorities of Venice.
Throughout the next year, the underwater robot will continue to clean the seabed of Venice, while continuing to evolve and refine its technology, so that, Once the project is finished in 2024, it can make the leap to the market.
83 million tons of plastic in the oceans
As Tecnalia has underlined, this system responds to the problem of the proliferation of waste in the bed of rivers and oceans, especially due to the dumping of plastic materials. For this reason, she recalled that it is estimated that there are currently 83 million tons of plastic waste in the oceans.
For this reason, he has ensured that the current situation requires, first of all, avoiding the entry of new plastics into the oceans, through “responsible” consumption and improving waste management systems in developing countries. And secondly, it is necessary eliminate marine macro-plastics already existing before they fragment into micro and nano-plastics, which contaminate the food chain and marine life.
Collect garbage from the seabed
Tecnalia has stated that the recovery of these plastic materials at the bottom of the ocean is an “arduous and slow” task and, in this context, a european consortium made up of 14 partners from 8 different countries work in the maelstrom projectwhich poses precisely “an efficient and selective robotic solution” to clean the bottom of the seas.
Specifically, Tecnalia has developed this robotic seabed cleaning system that It consists of a floating platform with an underwater cable robot.
For the collection of plastics and marine litter, the robot integrates two solutions: on the one hand, a 150 mm diameter suction duct for smaller size rubbish and, on the other hand, a hydraulic gripper to grab larger objects up to 130 kilograms such as tires, boxes, sections of sunken ships or fishing nets.
Up to 20 meters deep
The robot has been designed to work up to twenty meters deep without damaging aquatic ecosystems, and for this, it has integrated pressure and depth sensors. Also, it has vision cameras for displaying marine debris and a intelligent camera that allows the identification of marine debris by artificial intelligence and thus carry out its semi-automatic collection, helping the robot operator.
Mariola Rodríguez, responsible for the project at Tecnalia, has stated that the main advantages of this technological solution is that it operates from the surface of the water and that the collection heads are activated only when necessary, “achieving a high selectivity and minimizing the impact on the ecosystem“.
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