Plastic Waste is Exponentially Filling our Oceans, but where are the Robots?
This paper highlights a critical environmental problem—plastic pollution in oceans—and identifies a gap in robotics research, urging the community to address it, though it is incremental as it primarily reviews existing efforts.
The paper addresses the catastrophic exponential growth of plastic waste in oceans and rivers, noting that despite the severity of the problem, there is little robotics research focused on identifying, collecting, sorting, and removing plastic waste at various scales. It presents a cursory review of current efforts and calls for urgent action from the robotics community to leverage robots' potential in tackling this enormous challenge.
Plastic waste is filling our oceans at an exponential rate. The situation is catastrophic and has now garnered worldwide attention. Despite the catastrophic conditions, little to no robotics research is conducted in the identification, collection, sorting, and removal of plastic waste from oceans and rivers and at the macro- and micro-scale. Only a scarce amount of individual efforts can be found from private sources. This paper presents a cursory view of the current plastic water waste catastrophe, associated robot research, and other efforts currently underway to address the issue. As well as the call that as a community, we must wait no longer to address the problem. Surely there is much potential for robots to help meet the challenges posed by the enormity of this problem.