Development of Garbage Collecting Robot for Marine Microplastics

-3rd Report：Sandy beach integration experiment of the separation mechanism for garbage and sand-

Abstract

Marine microplastics are plastic products that are crushed while drifting through the ocean and washed up on beaches. The presence of these garbage threatens the safety of beaches and marine ecosystems seriously. However, it is difficult to manually collect small microplastics scattered on beaches. Therefore, this study aims to develop a cleaning robot that automatically collects marine microplastics scattered on beaches and eliminates the workload from people. In this paper, we first explain the concept of the cleaning robot, then describe the configuration of the robot (conveyor belt and transfer mechanism) for effective microplastics collection, and the integration experiment conducted on a beach.