“Waverider” - An Autonomous Smart Boat for Garbage Collection, Rescue Operations and Aquaculture

With increasing industrial revolution marine pollution and floating marine debris is becoming a major problem. If measures are not taken at an early stage, this marine trash grows unnoticed and will have consequences like death of aquatic organisms, blockage of seaways, thereby rendering the precious water resources unusable and posing a great threat for marine-based economies. Also, materials like plastics, glass discarded fishing equipment, industrial waste etc. will change the chemical and biological balance of the water resources causing very hazardous threats to humans and their health. Discarded plastics which may turn in to micro plastics are the most hazardous trash. With the help of today’s technology, addressing marine pollution will be a very easy task. The proposed idea is about an autonomous boat which collect the floating trash in lakes, ponds, rivers, banks and beaches and deposits those in trash collection facilities where the trash is classified and recycled. The boat works by an autonomous driving system which uses Computer Vision and Convolutional Neural Network and Deep Learning to Identify floating trash with video feed and drive the boat near the trash to pick those up. The Boat also can be controlled remotely or by using headless driving software called “ARDUPILOT”. The “ArduPilot” software comes with a mission planning tool to plot way points for the boat to cross in order to follow a uniform path. The boat can also be used for rescue operations during hydro-meteorological disasters and is fitted with appropriate sensors for aquaculture operations.