2022 2nd International Conference on Technological Advancements in Computational Sciences (ICTACS)
Design and Development of Automated Marine Trash
Collector for Trash collecting Applications
2022 2nd International Conference on Technological Advancements in Computational Sciences (ICTACS) | 978-1-6654-7657-7/22/$31.00 ©2022 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/ICTACS56270.2022.9988497
Md. Masood
Department of Electronics and InstrumentationEngineering
VR Siddhartha Engineering College
Kanuru, Vijayawada, AP, India
md.masood224@gmail.com
Abstract - Canals and rivers flowing through the cities and
villages plays very important role in the life of human beings
and animals, these are used as flood discharge and pollution
discharge gateways. Now a days huge amounts of trash such as
plastic waste, tree branches and harmful materials like e-waste
also deposits in the water with rainwater. Often, manual
cleaning is using to get rid of this garbage. This situation is
undesirable since it can harm to health of the people who ingest
that water and affects the health of the trash pickup operators.
The proposed marine trash collector used to clean small lakes,
rivers, and drainages. The designed marine trash collector is
automated, portable and able to collect the solid-state floating
waste on water. The system was designed with Blender software,
a 3D design software. An automated marine trash collector
collects garbage from small streams and is very useful for
garbage collectingworkers.
Key words: Marine Trash, E-waste, portable, small streams,
Blender software.
I. INTRODUCTION
Canals and rivers flowing through the cities and villages
plays very important role in the life of human beings and
animals, these are used as flood discharge and pollution
discharge gateways. In normal days some waste enters the
canals due to discharge of plastic waste and tree branches
which causes the pollution of water. In automated marine
trash collector, Hirdy Othman et al discussed how to collect
the trash from the marine with steel body [1], in this body of
the collector is heavy. This floating trash is mixed of plastic
bottles, plastic bags, branches, leaves and animal carcasses, .
62% of this trash is plastic. The species affected by the
harmful trash in water is 453, a twenty-one percent increase
in science 2012[2]. This harm full plastic waste not only
effects the water animals and the people who utilizes that
water for drinking purpose. Sometimes this harmful waste is
collected by manually; the persons who went to collect the
waste are also facing the health issues due to hazardous gases
coming from the waste. So it is very much required to
replace the manually collected trash process with
automated marine trash collector.
A. Existing Models
Many floating trash collection devices were existed by
using many designs for collection of trash , actuation and
control actions which are described here.in scooper robot
type contains series of scoopers mounted on a conveyor belt,
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978-1-6654-7657-7/22/$31.00 ©2022 IEEE
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Kalpana.Seelam
Department of Electronics and InstrumentationEngineering
VR Siddhartha Engineering College
Kanuru, Vijayawada, AP, India
kalpanaseelam@gmail.com
this component scoops the water in continuous pattern when
trash is detected it gets trapped in scoopers and is collected
in thecollection box [3]. Second type of collecting hardware
used is a belt with steel rods, to which hooks are attached and
it traps garbage, which comes in contact with these hooks [4].
Third type of collection hardware corresponds to a conveyor
belt with some partitions in it; trash that is trapped in these
partitions is collected in the collection box [5]. In expansible
surface waste cleaning robot propulsion, motor is used as
actuator; this type of actuation system consumes more power
just to move body of the robot [6]. Twin-blade rotors are used
in small scale under water drone based on a twin rotor system
[7]. This BLDC motor can drive relevantly high load when
compared to servomotor yet utilizing less power. We can also
use water jet to move the body of our robot and it can also
drive high loads but it utilizes more energy and is very hard
to control the direction of the robot so it is not preferable in
small stream applications [8]. By using different
microcontrollers like smart drive Duo-30 configure by using
t6 configuresoftware [4], Raspberry pi is also used for video
and audio processing in trash collector[6], AT895s2 is also
used for controlling the marine trash [10]. By studying above
all existing methods, the method, which is going to proposed,
is easy to develop by using Arduino. The programming in
Aurdino is also easy and user friendly, efficient, affordable
and portable. Which is automated also whenever trash is
presented it automatically suck in the bag.
II. DESIGN OF AUTOMATED MARINE TRASH COLLECTOR
The proposed marine trash collector comprises the most
feasible and most compatible methods from listed literature.
This device contains a partitioned conveyer belt as a
Collection Mechanism,as described above this conveyor belt
has some partitions in it, trash that is trapped in these
partitions is collected in the collection net. It uses Arduino
Uno as acontroller, this controller has a unique approach as a
controller, it is less cost and works on less power this
controller has its own IDE provided by its manufacturer and
its open for everyone. Proposed system is highly
economically feasible.
 2022 2nd International Conference on Technological Advancements in Computational Sciences (ICTACS)

C. Design and Fabrication of Body

The collector rover is designed in a 3d design software

called blender in this we have used nodal design method to
design the body, nodal design refers to a specific type of
design where we design a wireframe of the body and then
solidify it to get a rigid design, the wire frame off one of the
floats is shown in fig 2.

Figure 1. Block Diagram of the Automatic Maine Trash Collector

It uses very cost effective parts and uses a compact
battery with low power consumption. Marine trash collector
is very simple to design as it uses less components like RC
transmitter, receiver, Arduino Uno, ultrasonic sensor, esc
and l23d motor drivers, which are shown in fig 1, which are
easy to handle. This device is quite simple to operate and can
be controlled from the shore, the commands are given froma
remote transmitter which controls the body accordingto the
user commands. The collection mechanism is an automated
process as it detects the trash in betweenfloats and starts
collection.
Figure 2. Wire Frame of Float
The Fabrication of the body is done through 3D printing;
additive manufacturing or 3D is a process of making three-
dimensional solid objects from a digital file. The 3D printed
body is shown in fig 3. The process of printing in 3D is a
additive process, layers are laying down until the object is
created.

A. Software requirements for development of Marine Trash

Collector

To design marine trash collector requires two types of

software are required, one is for designing the structure and
another one is for writing program for controlling action.
They are designing Software to makethis model a buoyant
one a precisely designed body is required, which is achieved
by using blender software. For the uninterrupted function of
this model controller has to be programmed precisely which
can be achieved by a suitable IDE (Integrated Development
Environment) is used.
B. Hardware requirements for development of Marine
Trash Collector
For the Model to work properly it requires specific
hardware parts to control, for better movement, for collection.
A well modelled body to hold these hardware parts in place
they are remote controller, controller, electronic speed
controller, Motor driver, BLDC motor, Geared Motor, Servo
motor, Ultrasonic Sensor, 11.1V LiPo battery, 3D printed
rigid body.
Figure 3. 3D Printed Body
III. DEVELOPMENT OF AUTOMATED MARINE TRASH
COLLECTOR
Marine trash collector has to perform tasks in a specific
order to work perfectly, for example, it has to move in the
specific direction as per the command given through the
Remote controller so it has to follow a functional block
diagram to work properly the functional block diagram for
this collector is shown in Fig 1. The commands from the
receiver and sensor are given to the Controller unit, which in
turn controls the Motor drivers to provide movement to the
body, this controller controls the speed and direction the

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 2022 2nd International Conference on Technological Advancements in Computational Sciences (ICTACS)

motors according to the commands from receiver and input

from ultrasonic sensor. When trash enters between the floats
of the trash collector the ultrasonic sensor gives the signal to
the controller, the controller rotates the Geared motor linked
to conveyor belt.

The program Runs in such a way that, the controller

waits for the command from the receiver about the
commands, when commands are received, based on the
channel of the receiver the controller turns on the respective
motors i.e., if the front back command is received the
controller turns ON the BLDC motor, if directions commands
are received the servo motor is rotated to its respective
direction or angle. The distance measured by sensor is
monitored continuously and if thedistance is less than 25 cm
the conveyor motor is rotated in clockwise direction pulling Figure 5 a. Prototype of Marine Trash Collector
the trash into the provided net.
As per the implementation, the collector has been
deployed for two trips and the trash collected is weighed
onshore after collection for each trip during first trip the
collector collected 400 grams of trash fromthe site and the
weight is not accurate as the trash is wet. During second trip,
the collector collected 350 grams of trash from the site before
its battery has fully discharged.

Figure 4. Working Flow of Trash collector

Figure 5 b. Prototype of Marine Trash Collector withcollected trash
IV. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS
The readings of ultrasonic sensor without trash and with
The following table 1 described about the specifications trash between floats are recorded in centimeters scale. The
of the proposed automated marine trash collector, as it is a distance between transmitter and receiver is reduced when the
prototype, we limited its dimensions to 50 x50cm. trash comes between transmitter and receiver which is
observed in the following readings from the table 2
TABLE I. SPECIFICATIONS OF PROPOSED SYSTEM
TABLE II. READINGS OF ULTRASONIC SENSOR
Dimensions of the body 50 cm x 30 cm
Reading of ultrasonic Reading of ultrasonic
Dimensions of the collection net 40 cm x 50 cm Serial sensor without object sensor with object
Number between transmitter and between transmitter and
Dimensions of conveyor belt 20 cm x 20 cm receiver in centimeters receiver in centimeters
1 34 24.1
When the trash is entered into area where the ultrasonic 2 34 29
pair present, then the transmitter send signal to controller.
The controller in turn activates the conveyer belt to collect 3 34 27
the trash and put it in the given net bag. Developed prototype 4 34 26
is shown in the below fig5a and Fig 5.b. 5 34 24
6 34 23

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 2022 2nd International Conference on Technological Advancements in Computational Sciences (ICTACS)

7 34 21 [10] CHEN Su, WANG Dongxing, LIU Tiansong, REN Weichong and
ZHONG Yachao “An Autonomous Ship for Cleaning the Garbage
8 34 20 Floating on a Lake” Second International Conference on Intelligent
Computation Technology and Automation” 2009, DOI:
9 34 19 10.1109/ICICTA.2009.579.
10 34 18

V. CONCLUSION

We successfully develop and test a prototype of an

Automatic Marine Trash Collector for trash-collecting
applications. The proposed trash collector is small and
suitable to collect trash in narrow and small areas. The
proposed prototype performance is tested in Bandar canal,
which is located in Vijayawada; on trial, test the automated
marine trash collector collects nearly 500g of floating solid
trash efficiently in single trip. Therefore, by using this we can
clean small streams without effecting the human health and
reduce the contamination of water due to floating waste in
water.

VI. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Md. Masood student B.Tech EIE and Kalpana Seelam

Asst. Prof Dept. of EIE acknowledges the Department of EIE
in Velagapudi RamakrishnaSiddhartha Engineering College,
Vijayawada for providing facilities to complete this work.

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