I-Corps: Aquatic debris cleanup using multi-agent unmanned surface vehicles and hotspot-based path optimization

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is to benefit US shorelines. The World Economic Forum predicts that by 2050 there will be more plastic than fish in the world's oceans. Waterfront maintenance workers face the brunt of the marine trash pollution issue as 80% of marine trash is sourced near-shore.

As a result, waterfront governments alone spend a total of $10.2 billion to clean these waterways. The proposed technology benefits ecosystems by removing trash pollution from our shores, thereby preventing ecosystem degradation and allowing people to both benefit from marine services now and in the future.

This I-Corps project introduces the use of Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USV) to maximize debris cleanup performance and provide affordable solutions to cleaning these waterways. Solutions are being developed to address the oceanic plastic pollution problem once the debris is already in the ocean; however, insufficient effort is directed towards improving shoreline pickup, which contains 80% of plastic debris.

Human-operated methods to collect the debris is inefficient and cost ineffective. This opens the door to expand USV technology to waterway maintenance. Similarly, USV environmental monitoring capabilities may provide data to the waterways and researchers such as oxygen monitoring for algae blooms and affordable data capture.

The team currently has a working prototype and partnerships at the Jacobs School of Engineering and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The I-Corps customer discovery activities will reveal the exact pain points experienced in these waterways to inform the proposed technology.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.