Headlight - Horizon

We chose the challenge of cleaning up oceans from the "Oceans of the Earth" category.

There is such a large accumulation of rubbish in the ocean that it is recognized as Garbage Island, and this is one of the greatest environmental catastrophes produced by mankind.

Solution

We have developed the idea of a Autonomous Boat, whereby through an intelligent satellite-linked system that monitors and identifies zones and islands of trash in the ocean, will route the Autonomous Boat's route to those zones. The boat will have two autonomous Drones, one aerial and one underwater and with a compartment to store the collected waste.

Figure 1 - Places where the garbage islands are

Aerial drone

The aerial Drone flies over the Autonomous Boat's range, and through image processing performs a search for debris in the area to help direct the underwater Drone so that it can remove all debris from the area and leave nothing behind.

Underwater drone

The underwater Drone, through image processing, recognizes waste from the ocean, has a small compartment that is docked but removable and opens when collecting, where it stores this waste until it reaches its maximum capacity, where the Drone will return to the Autonomous Boat and its full compartment will be replaced with another void for the collection process to begin again until the autonomous boat's storage capacity reaches its maximum capacity. The underwater Drone also gives a signal if some kind of marine life approaches it, pushing it away so that it cannot harm them.

Energy

The Autonomous Boat acts as a base for both Drones, it is from it that the Drones draw the energy to be recharged, this energy is generated from two sources, energy captured from the sun, solar energy, and energy captured from the wind, energy wind.

Figure 2 - Solar energy

Figure 3 - Wind energy

Being a Autonomous Boat, you do not need a human to control it, because through machine learning and obstacles it will become smarter and more accurate every day.

When the Autonomous Boat is at its maximum storage capacity, it will return to a land base, which will be where all this waste will be processed, and the waste will be recycled. In the terrestrial base there will also be the central system of the whole project, from which it will be made available all the data and processes to the public leaving transparently the whole process of collecting and cleaning the oceans, so that people can follow up public way.

Public Web Application Collect

We have a web application and an application where the data collected is updated every 24 hours. So the population can observe how the ocean cleaning is going. So becoming more aware every day is a very hard process to be able to collect at least 1 ton of trash from the bottom of the oceans

Figure 4 - Horizon system

Project:

https://github.com/WesGtoX/horizon

Resources used from NASA:

• https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4174
• https://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/Altimetric_Data_Inform...
• https://winds.jpl.nasa.gov/aboutscatterometry/hist...
• https://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/SeaSurfaceTemperature
• https://sealevel.jpl.nasa.gov/data/
• https://oceancolor.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/aqua/
• https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/phod/gdp/data.php
• https://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/greenspace/clean...

External references:

• https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.7b02368
• https://theoceancleanup.com/
• https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15611
• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6132564/