Dutch company RanMarine Technology has developed an autonomously floating drone for cleaning waters using Deutsche Telekom’s positioning technology for navigation.

It supplements data from satellites to provide more precise information. In this way, the drone avoids breaks and detours.

About 80 per cent of the plastic waste in oceans comes from rivers, canals, harbours and beaches. To clean these waterways and counteract the increasing pollution of the oceans, start-up RanMarine has launched the WasteShark. This aqua drone, powered by two electric motors, swims through targeted areas of polluted waterways, swallowing floating waste such as plastic bottles and bags or disturbing biomass such as invasive algae.

The device can be controlled by radio but, in a claimed world first, can also autonomously follow a set route. Funding for this came from the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme, among others.

The cleaning drone is equipped with a camera, sensors and a GNSS receiver. It orients itself independently in the water. It also avoids obstacles using a front camera and lidar sensor. The sensor detects objects by laser and displays them in three dimensions. Users have previously defined the waypoints of the collection route on a digital map.

One weakness so far has been the inaccuracy in determining the position via satellite. It can be several metres. This is too imprecise for the WasteShark, which is supposed to use sensors to measure water quality, among other things, and then transmit the measurement points precisely. And in the future, the floating robot will be able to empty its waste container and recharge its battery at a docking station.

This is where Deutsche Telekom’s positioning technology comes in. It enables determination of the position of mobile vehicles to within a few centimetres.

Here’s how it works. A network of hundreds of reference stations on several continents measures local satellite navigation interference. The cloud-based service from Deutsche Telekom (www.telekom.com) partner Swift Navigation (www.swiftnav.com) sends the corrected position data via mobile communications to WasteShark, which uses the information for more precise navigation.

Precise positioning brings RanMarine several advantages. Not only does the drone find its way safely to the loading and unloading station, it travels more efficiently on the marked course and can collect more waste in the same time, reducing costs and requiring fewer charging cycles. In addition, the location and timing of water quality data measured along the way, such as pH or temperature, can be accurately determined. The aqua drone can also avoid obstacles more reliably.

“Telekom’s system is significantly more reliable than public corrective services and works out-of-the-box,” said Richard Hardiman, CEO of RanMarine Technology. “In addition, the service is available in almost every area in the world where our WasteShark (www.ranmarine.io/products/wasteshark) is deployed. Precise positioning provides us with the accuracy and scalability we need to continually evolve our Aqua drones.”

RanMarine (www.ranmarine.io) will demonstrate its aqua drone on September 20 and 21 at the Digital X (www.digital-x.eu/en/events/digital-x-2023) event in Cologne, Germany.