TUTORIAL 7 INTRO: The SeaClear Project: A Use-case for Robotic Marine Litter Collection and Recycling Aspects
Today’s oceans contain tens of millions tons of waste, with approximately 94% located on the seafloor. Existing collection efforts have focused mostly on surface waste, with only a few local efforts to gather underwater waste, always using human divers. This tutorial aims at sharing the latest advancements in the SeaClear project, highlighting key challenges, current developments and first results from trials of the SeaClear system for collecting litter from the seabed under varying environmental conditions and the lifecycle of collected materials. In the first part of the tutorial, we will cover control aspects of marine robotics in disturbance-prone underwater environments for collecting small-scale objects from the seafloor, presenting on a technical and methodological level that could be transferable to other projects. In the second part, we will discuss the phase after collection, involving the up-/re-cycling of marine litter.