Semi-autonomous/ autonomous trash collecting water vessel within a Geofenced Environment

Trash floating on harbor water is not a rare sight. Quite often it happens due to drift of thrash from the sea and possibly it has nothing to do with the actual environment that the thrash accumulates. Still, besides the social economic impact and the visual impairment, there is a biological downside for the environment that can be addressed with present engineering means. With the current leaps in technology in both sensing and with the help of AI, it is possible to design a semi-autonomous/autonomous trash collecting water vessel within a Geofenced Environment(i.e. a harbor) that can navigate efficiently through harbors and coastal areas. This project will create a water trash cleaning vessel that can be either semi-autonomous or fully autonomous designed to clean up and remove debris and litter from the waters in harbors and coastal areas. The project will create a concept design that will use System engineering principles to propose a solution subject to cost and scalability constraints. It will decompose the problem from the cleaning goals to set of system level requirements in terms of the vessel form factor and its propulsion architecture, the collection mechanism, the HW compute and the overall fault tolerant and failsafe functionality (i.e. redundancy in core domains so that platform can always be navigated back to base), the sensing and localisation modalities and of course the trash collection and trash disposal and docking mechanisms. End-goal is the CAD model of the platform, electrical architecture, HW and actuation architecture, the block diagram of the autonomy stack and human machine interface and also the manufacturing of the prototype as a proof-of-concept.