Plastics, cans, wood, electrical appliances, bags, nets… there are all kinds of waste in the oceans, mainly the result of human activity. In addition to legislation and environmental prevention and education work that prevent the sea from becoming a landfill, cleaning up this debris requires technologies that allow the detailed location, typification and characterisation of debris in coastal areas. With this objective and by bringing together the knowledge of researchers, companies and civil society, the LitterDrone project was born, selected in the European BlueLabs call, which was presented this Thursday at the EE of Telecommunications. The initiative is led by the Image Processing and Virtual Reality Group (GPI-RV) and has the participation of the I-markt group, also from the University of Vigo, together with the topographic material company Grafinta and the Spanish Association of Marine Litter. The purpose of LitterDrone is, as explained by Professor Fernando Martín, project coordinator and GPI-RV researcher, “to apply the technologies of unmanned aerial vehicles or drones to obtain images that will later be processed for the detection of possible waste present on beaches or other coastal areas”. It would be about, he points out, “knowing where there is waste and what type to help the staff in charge of cleaning”.
Student involvement to turn the project into a marketable product
The project has a duration of two years and a total budget of €392,657, of which the European Union contributes €312,998. The characteristics of the BlueLabs call, promoted by the Executive Agency for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (Easme) and financed by the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund, largely determine the initiative. The project must be developed by students supervised by researchers and company representatives and, once the execution period has ended, a product or service must be generated that has to reach the market. The purpose of this call is to support the blue economy, that related to the European marine environment through innovative and multidisciplinary projects with the capacity to become a tangible product that can be made available to the needs and demands of society.
This synergy between different R&D groups, companies and society was highlighted by the rector of the University, Salustiano Mato, at the presentation ceremony, highlighting that this type of consortium is very important to achieve success in calls for international competitive competition. He also recalled that in this case 50 proposals were submitted from all over Europe, four of which were selected, three of which involved the University of Vigo. Along with LitterDrone, led by Vigo, SpilLess and Amalia were also selected, in which two Marine Sciences groups are involved. In fact, the professor of the GEOMA group Ana Bernabéu presented during this conference the characteristics of SpilLess, an innovative “laboratory” to develop new and viable solutions in the management of marine pollution, in particular, oil spills. For the rector “this is the way to work and build the future, permeating and combining capabilities, which is what we understand by intelligent cooperation”. The director of the EE of Telecommunications, Íñigo Cuiñas, also emphasized this point and highlighted the importance of the convergence of the technological and scientific fields, “fields that are often distant”, to work for the health of the planet.
Project development
Pilar Zorzo, from the Spanish Association of Marine Litter, was in charge of providing an overview of the project, which arises from the struggle to achieve “a sea free of waste”, understanding these as solid and manufactured waste that ends up in coastal areas, that is, “that is the result of human activity”. She explained that the key to this process “is knowing what they are, the quantities of each thing and where the waste is”, not only to proceed with removing them, but also to know the origin of these wastes and undertake “management measures to prevent their generation”. The key is “the characterization of the waste” and, with this project, the aim will be to monitor the waste in an automated way, for which drones equipped with digital cameras will be used. This is the part that will be in charge of the company Grafinta, which will carry out several test phases, in Huete (Madrid) and in the Cíes Islands. These flights will be used to test and choose the type of aircraft and camera that will be used in the second phase. The experts will test a fixed-wing aircraft that will fly at a height of 100 meters, testing the effectiveness of a visible camera, a multispectral camera and a thermal camera. The test will be repeated with a multirotor aircraft that will take images between 10 and 15 meters high. Based on the data obtained, it will be decided which camera and which drone to use in the second part of the project. The images obtained from that moment will be sent to the Image Processing and Virtual Reality group, which will design software capable of identifying foreign objects in the images and characterizing what type of debris it is “based on the different spectral components (wavelengths) of the light that are reflected in each type of garbage”, explains Fernando Martín. This task will be based on the extraction of features, converting the data and numerical vectors that will then allow the development of a system capable of learning the different types of marine debris and classifying them. At the same time, the researchers will also try to obtain “a global, gigantic image of all the sampling areas, combining the information from all the images in terms of height, location, viewing angle, etc.”
The final result “should be one or more software tools that allow the detection of different types of waste: plastic, hydrocarbon…” and it is in this last part that the I-markt group would be involved, which will carry out a study of the possible services and/or business models that may arise to exploit the developed technology, as highlighted by researcher Carmen Otero.
Os investigadores agardan que este verán comece a fase de desenvolvemento das aplicacións definitivas e que a etapa de validación e deputación das mesmas arranque un ano despois, en xullo de 2018, concluíndo o proxecto coa fase de mercado en xaneiro de 2019.
Source: DUVI
