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Development of Garbage Collecting Robot for Marine Microplastics
Summary
This paper describes the design of a robot intended to collect microplastics from beaches, addressing the practical challenge that hand collection of scattered, tiny plastic particles is impractical at scale. Laboratory experiments characterized how sand behaves under the robot's excavation mechanism, providing engineering data for building autonomous marine microplastic cleanup devices.
Marine microplastics originate from plastic products and are crushed as they drift through the ocean, posing a serious threat to marine ecosystems. Nonetheless, collecting these scattered and small microplastics by hand from washed-up beaches is challenging. Consequently, we are working on designing a cleaning robot to automatically gather marine microplastics on beaches. This paper outlines the primary mechanism of the cleaning robot and explores the necessary functions for effective microplastic collection. Two kinds of experiments exploring the behavior of sand in stationary and dynamically states, “Pseudo-Angle of Repose Measurement Experiment” and “Claw Excavation Experiment”, are carried out using an experimental model of a cleaning robot.