Water Surface Cleaning using a Multi-Sensor Surface Vehicle

Autonomous robots have seen dramatic advances in recent years; however, it still lacks application in water surface cleaning, which mainly relies on manual operation. This paper presents a fully autonomous robot, SMURF, for water surface cleaning including mechanical, hardware design, and the core part-autonomy system. Through investigating the needs of water surface waste cleaning in different water scenarios, we proposed a multi-sensor fusion scheme, which has been applied to the SMURF to achieve better water surface cleaning effects. In addition, we conducted experiments in two different water scenarios to verify the accurate self-localization and independent path planning ability of the SMURF. The experimental results indicate the SMURF has the above capabilities, which can guarantee the smooth implementation of the water surface cleaning tasks. This can to some extent prevent waste from being transported to the ocean.