ATRON: Autonomous trash retrieval for oceanic neatness

TL;DR

This paper presents ATRON, an autonomous boat designed to collect floating trash in oceans using advanced sensors and path planning techniques.

Contribution

The novel contribution is an integrated system combining SLAM, computer vision, and motion planning for autonomous ocean trash collection.

Findings

ATRON successfully identified and collected floating debris in a controlled environment.

The system's path planning and obstacle avoidance capabilities were validated in an indoor pool.

PID tuning improved the boat's trajectory following performance.

Abstract

The subject of this article is the development of an unmanned surface vehicle (USV) for the removal of floating debris. A twin-hulled boat with four thrusters placed at the corners of the vessel is used for this purpose. The trash is collected in a storage space through a timing belt driven by an electric motor. The debris is accumulated in a funnel positioned at the front of the boat and subsequently raised through this belt into the garbage bin. The boat is equipped with a spherical camera, a long-range 2D LiDAR, and an inertial measurement unit (IMU) for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). The floating debris is identified from rectified camera frames using YOLO, while the LiDAR and IMU concurrently provide the USV’s odometry. Visual methods are utilized to determine the location of debris and obstacles in the 3D environment. The optimal order in which the debris is collected is determined by solving the orienteering problem, and the planar convex hull of the boat is combined with map and obstacle data via the Open Motion Planning Library (OMPL) to perform path planning. Pure pursuit is used to generate the trajectory from the obtained path. Limits on the linear and angular velocities are experimentally estimated, and a PID controller is tuned to improve path following. The USV is evaluated in an indoor swimming pool containing static obstacles and floating debris.

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