SUTD Staff and Students Work Together With Smart AI-Powered Robots in Beach Clean-Up

The robots have landed – in Paris Ris Park Beach.

Four smart robots from the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) made their way to Pasir Ris Park today to help their human teammates clean the beach.

Together with Guest-of-Honour, Mr Baey Yam Keng, Senior Parliamentary Secretary (SPS) for the Ministry of Sustainability and the Environment as well as the Ministry of Transport, and the SUTD community comprising students, faculty and administrative staff, the smart robots spent three hours sweeping, scooping and scoping land and sea for rubbish.

The autonomous pavement sweeping robot – PANTHERA 2.0 – comes equipped with advanced AI-driven sensing and navigation capabilities, enabling it to navigate autonomously and avoid obstacles while cleaning. The four-legged robot – Procyon – which was originally designed for search and locate operations, is also equipped with AI technologies such as image recognition and avoidance collision to aid in its operation. Procyon’s agility enables it to easily “walk” on sand and climb over uneven surfaces, where it can help to transport bins of trash to the disposal area.

Joining the PANTHERA and Procyon in the beach cleaning exercise are two other robots that have been repurposed in-house. AQUARS (Aquatic Quick Utility and Retrieval System), a boat-like surface robot, which usually aids in the recovery of aerial-maritime drones that have fallen into the sea, has been modified to recover floating trash.

Another robot, which was originally designed as a mechanical trolley by SUTD’s Design and Artificial Intelligence (DAI) students for a term project, has also been retrofitted by the SUTD Organisation of Autonomous Robotics¹ (SOAR), into a beach cleaning robot called Sand-E. It not only has the ability to traverse the sandy beach easily via a continuous track propulsion system, but also to sweep up litter such as plastic debris washed up near the surface of the shoreline by sifting through sand. SOAR collaborated with Polymate, an SUTD alumnus start-up, to acquire the materials and technical knowledge required to develop the robot. Sand-E is a perfect example of the close-knit, interdisciplinary maker community in SUTD.

Besides robots, there is also the BLASTER (Better Localised Autonomous Scouring and Tethered Ejecting Rotorcraft), a tethered flying drone whose flight control is computer assisted with in-built-AI. It is also equipped with pressurised jetting capabilities, which can clean hard-to-reach structures at the beaches, such as buildings and beach walls, etc. A full list of the technologies on demo and brief explanations of how they work can be found in Annex A.

SUTD President, Professor Phoon Kok Kwang said: “At SUTD, it is never business as usual. We are constantly looking at new and innovative ways to do even the most mundane of tasks. Take this beach clean-up for example. Like many other organisations before us, we have activated our community to come down here today – the difference is that our little village comprises not just faculty, staff, and students, but also smart robots!

“SUTD has always been different. It’s our DNA. And now, we are once again trailblazing by charting a bold course towards AI as the world’s first Design AI University. Today’s event provides a glimpse into our vision of humans and AI collaborating seamlessly. Our smart robots and drones, designed and retrofitted in-house, are here to demonstrate their potential as they assist in cleaning the beach. On their own, each robot and drone is a tool designed for specific tasks. Organised the way we have for today’s clean up, they formed a team with us, expanding how and what we can clean,” he added.

Vincent Ho, 24, a Year 2 Engineering Product Development student and lead of SOAR behind Sand-E, said: “We are very excited to participate in this beach clean-up as it gives us the opportunity to test our ideas and further develop Sand-E’s AI and technical capabilities. Sand-E was a passion project that the team had worked on by repurposing it from an earlier project design. We are very proud of how it has turned out.”

1 SOAR is a student club that focusses on autonomous robotics platforms, AI and machine learning frameworks. It aims to nurture a committed robotics community through impactful projects and member development. The Club adopts Robot Operating System (ROS) as the main robotics middleware framework to keep pace with industry demands as well as to ensure that its projects are cross-compatible and hardware-agnostic.