Project description
Innovative system for water waste detection and collection
The pollution of urban harbours and delta water represents a major environmental problem. The EU-funded WasteShark project is proposing the low-cost innovative WasteShark™ system, the first autonomous drone system worldwide for water waste removal. The system consists of two components, the WasteSharks and the SharkPod. The WasteSharks is a drone or swarm of drones appositely designed to operate in a waste-rich area, identifying the largest concentration of debris, collecting the waste and delivering it to the SharkPod, which is a waste removal/unloading docking station/installation. The system allows the collection of a wide range of waste such as plastics and non-biodegradables, liquid waste (oils and chemicals) and harmful biomass. The project will place emphasis on plastic debris, which causes unrecoverable damage to the oceans.
Objective
"Our innovation is a low-cost high-tech product that cleans urban/ harbour/delta waters: the WasteSharkTM-system. It is the world’s first autonomous drone-system designed to remove unwanted material. It consists of two components:
- WasteSharks: a (swarm of) drone(s)
- SharkPod: a launch/remove/waste unloading docking station/installation
Our vision is to put a WasteShark-system in a specific waste-rich area (close to trash chokeholds that are found consistently) where a holistically networked swarm of WasteSharks finds and collects the waste and then delivers its ""catch"" to the SharkPod. When deployed, the WasteSharks match learned and known conditions and head directly to where the largest concentration of debris is, given the information gathered on prior missions.
The swarm capability will increase efficiency of our drones, by 50% for a small swarm and 120% for the swarm of 10 drones. This allows existing and potential customers to become more efficient in collecting waste, whether plastics and other non-biodegradables (solid waste), oils and chemicals (liquid waste), pest plants (harmful biomass) or a combination of those.
Used widely in the markets we will be focusing on, the WasteShark results in a 12 - 32% worldwide decrease of plastic debris (estimated between 4.8 to 12.7 million metric tons) that reaches open waters and causes not recoverable damage to our oceans."
Fields of science
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-2 - SME instrument phase 2Coordinator
3029 AK Rotterdam
Netherlands
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.