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Autonomous swimming robot collects plastic waste

The Dutch company RanMarine Technology has developed an autonomous floating drone for cleaning bodies of water. The floating robot recently began using Deutsche Telekom's Precise Positioning System for precise navigation.

The Dutch company RanMarine Technology has developed an autonomous floating drone for cleaning bodies of water. It has recently started using Deutsche Telekom's Precise Positioning System for precise navigation. It supplements the data from satellites and provides more precise information than these. This allows the drone to avoid breaks and detours.

Around 80 per cent of plastic waste in the oceans comes from rivers and canals or from harbours and beaches. In order to clean these waterways and thus counteract the increasing pollution of the oceans, the start-up RanMarine has developed the WasteShark was launched on the market. The Aqua drone is powered by two electric motors. It swims through polluted areas of water and swallows waste in the process. These include plastic bottles and bags or disturbing biomass, such as invasive algae. The device can be controlled by radio. Or it can autonomously follow a defined route. This world first was funded by the EU programme Horizon 2020 promoted.

The cleaning drone is equipped with a camera, sensors and a GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) receiver. It orients itself independently in the water. It also avoids obstacles. A front camera and a LiDAR sensor (light detection and ranging) help with this. The sensor recognises objects by laser and displays them in three dimensions. Users have previously defined the waypoints of the collection route on a digital map. A weak point so far: the inaccuracy in determining the position via satellite. It can be several metres. Too imprecise for the WasteShark, which uses sensors to measure water quality, among other things, and then transmit the exact measurement points. And in future, the floating robot will autonomously head for a docking station to empty its waste container and recharge its battery. 

Precise Positioning delivers correction data from the cloud

Here comes the Telekom solution Precise Positioning into play: It enables extremely precise determination of the position of mobile vehicles - accurate to within a few centimetres. And this is how it works: a comprehensive network of hundreds of reference stations on several continents measures local disruptions in satellite navigation. The cloud-based service from Deutsche Telekom partner Swift Navigation sends the corrected position data to WasteShark via mobile radio, which uses the information for more precise navigation.

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Precise Positioning offers RanMarine several advantages. The drone not only finds its way safely to the loading and unloading station. It is more efficient when travelling on the mapped out course and can collect more rubbish in the same time - which reduces costs and requires fewer charging cycles. In addition, the location and time of the water quality data measured en route, such as pH value or temperature, can be determined precisely. The aqua drone can avoid obstacles even more reliably. 

„Telekom's system is much more reliable than public correction services and works out-of-the-box. In addition, the service is available in almost all areas of the world where our WasteShark is in use. Precise Positioning gives us the accuracy and scalability we need to continuously develop our Aqua drones.“

Richard Hardiman, Founder and CEO of RanMarine Technology. 

The Dutch launch their aqua drone on 20 and 21 September at Digital X 2023 in Cologne Europe's largest cross-sectoral Digitisation initiative. Organised by Deutsche Telekom, it brings together over 300 national and international partners.

Source: German Telekom

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