METHODS article
Front. Robot. AI
Sec. Field Robotics
This article is part of the Research TopicHomo Aquaticus: New Frontiers in Living and Working in the OceanView all 10 articles
ATRON: Autonomous Trash Retrieval for Oceanic Neatness
Provisionally accepted
- 1New York University, New York, United States
- 2Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, United States
- 3New York University Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
- 4New York Univeristy Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
The development of an unmanned surface vehicle (USV) for floating debris removal is the subject of this article. A twin-hulled boat is employed with four thrusters placed at the corners of the vessel. 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 forward 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 IMU for Simultaneous Localization And Map-ping (SLAM). The floating debris is identified from the rectified camera frames using YOLO, while the LiDAR and the IMU concurrently provide the USV's odometry. Visual methods are employed to determine the location of debris and obstacles in the 3D environment. The optimal order in which the debris are 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 experimen-27 tally 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.
Keywords: collision avoidance, path planning, Uncrewed MarineVessel, YOLO object detection, Orienteering problem
Received: 03 Oct 2025; Accepted: 17 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Abanes, Jang, Erkinov, Awadalla and Tzes. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Anthony Tzes
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.