Clearbot

The Problem

Today there exists a global ocean plastic crisis and keeping trash out of water is now a necessity. This major issue is underlined under the United Nation SDG 6 - Clean Water and Sanitation. Solving this area of concern for large water bodies would even help in keeping with SDG 14 - Life Under Water. Even with this existing crisis, there are no effective industry tools to remove trash from water bodies and solutions still involve using large nets or hand picking. For every 100USD spent, we still only pullout 100kgs of trash. Several industries such as ocean/river construction projects, tourism associations, resorts, marinas, harbors, municipal governments and recyclers pay exorbitant sums of money to remove trash from water bodies.  Clearly, there is a massive need and global demand for a modern and effective solution to this problem.

Our Proposal

At Clearbot, our vision is to empower local governments and water-communities with cutting edge technology so that they can keep trash out of their water.  Clearbot is a swarm of trash collecting robots that use AI-Vision to detect and then collect trash from water bodies. These robots are fully autonomous, solar-powered and work as a team to remove trash from oceans and rivers. Clearbot is 15x Cheaper, 5x more reach and remove 2x more trash daily (24x7x365). With Clearbot, every 1000 USD spent results in 1 ton of waste removed. The system is designed to be operable by even the most non-technically adept users and can be bundled into a box, shipped to anywhere in the world and installed on a home-made bamboo or wooden frame. The goal is to keep the cost of the robot under 1000 USD so as so make it price competitive with current waste collection methods. Clearbot is one of the world’s most advanced project in this field with cutting edge AI-Vision Trash Detection. The swarm can be scaled upto 900 units without any change in architecture. Further, the robots can waypoint navigate with an accuracy of 2m even in rough seas.  The decentralized robot swarm system makes the Clearbot ecosystem very robust, since the loss/damage of a single robot means the whole system is not shut down. The swarm system further reduces the cost and effort of scaling since a larger system simply involves adding more entities. The goal is to have Clearbot in global waters by the end of the year.

We Assume that...

1) AI works in most conditions 2) Robots can overcome most currents in the operational area 3) Near- Surface trash is a significant portion of ocean trash

Constraints to Overcome

There have been some innovations in this field to tackle the issue of keeping trash out of water. Ocean Cleanup, Mr Trash Wheel, Waste Shark and AltruBot are all tech based solutions to the issue. However they are highly expensive with prices ranging rom 5000 USD of AltruBot to 24.6 million USD of Ocean Cleanup. The Clearbot on the other hand is semi-open source and costs only 1000 USD. Neither of them offer any modularity or swarm support whereas Clearbot does. One of the major differences is that Clearbot is auto navigating and uses AI Vision for the purpose whereas all our competitors depend on ocean currents or manual defined routes which is highly inefficient. These are the major barriers that we have overcome to make Clearbot a more viable option for trash removal from oceans. We are also the only (and most cutting edge) ocean swarm & vision combo for trash cleaning.

Current Work

1) Iteration of current product with customer (via pilots) until ready for full commercial release 2) Fundraising to move from prototype to manufacturing 3) Open-sourcing of framework & documentation

Current Needs

Skills: We need someone with prior experience in swarm robotics, USV Mission planning or AI-Vision Resources: We are actively looking for anyone willing to help us run a pilot in their water! Funding: We are looking to raise our first round of equity capital to move form prototype to product.