Every year, 4,5 trillion cigarette butts end up in the environment. One of the places most plagued by annoying (and smelly) waste is the beach: there hordes of smokers often cover up the "butt", but not the problem.
Edwin Boss e Martijn Lukaart, two co-founding researchers of TechTics, created BeachBot. It is a concept that explores the possibility of interaction between humans and robots for a world without waste. It goes hand in hand with the street "cleaning" robot already in service in Helsinki, or the boat cleaner robot instead navigate the Danish rivers.
Cigarette butts have found their Terminator
BeachBot, or “BB” for friends who don't know who Brigitte Bardot is, can locate cigarette butts, snatch them from the sand and throw them in a safe bin. And it is a project that winks at collective intelligence and machine learning, too. Anyone can connect to BB and make it smarter by training its image detection algorithm: just send photos of cigarette butts.
The system will become better and better at recognizing cigarette butts: crushed, semi-sanded, buried: it will be relentless.
To help amass those photos, the BB team turned to Microsoft Trove, an app designed to connect AI developers with photographers. Thanks to the team's efforts, the Scheveningen beach in the Netherlands (where BB completed its first test mission) now has a coastline cleaner of cigarette butts.
Here is a video of the cute beach sweeper cleaning the shoreline of cigarette butts:
