EcoBoat cleans pools and lakes using simple sensors and design
EcoBoat: Design and Experimental Validation of an Autonomous Body-Board Boat For Cleaning Water Bodies
Robotics
Summary
Cleaning floating trash from water like pools or lakes usually needs either a lot of human work or expensive robots with many sensors. The authors created EcoBoat, a small, low-cost boat that cleans water surfaces by moving around on its own. It uses simple sensors indoors to detect walls and obstacles and GPS outdoors to stay within a certain area. Its special basket design helps catch trash when moving forward but keeps it from falling out when turning or stopping. Tests in real pools and lakes showed that this simple approach works well for collecting debris.
What this means in practice
- •For facility maintenance teams: Automate cleaning of indoor swimming pools with a low-cost robot that uses simple sensors to remove floating debris without extensive manual effort.
- •For environmental monitoring teams: Deploy budget-friendly autonomous boats to collect floating trash from lakes using GPS-based area coverage without complex onboard sensing.
Authors
M. Aman Ansari, Saifullah Khan, Rahul Kulkarni, PB Sujit
Abstract
Cleaning water bodies such as swimming pools and lakes typically demands significant manual effort or reliance on costly, sensor-intensive robotic systems. This paper presents EcoBoat, a low-cost autonomous surface vehicle built on a modified hull, designed to collect floating debris in both indoor and outdoor water bodies. For indoor environments, EcoBoat uses ultrasonic sensors to detect boundaries and obstacles, combining random-walk motion with boundary-following behavior. For outdoor environments, it relies on GPS-based geofencing paired with a random-walk strategy for area coverage. A key design feature is a Tesla-valve-inspired collection basket that allows debris intake during forward motion while preventing its escape during turning or braking. Field experiments in pools and lakes validated the design through iterative refinement, demonstrating that a minimalist sensing and computation approach can achieve effective, versatile debris collection across diverse water bodies.