Visitors to the area’s beaches may see something different next summer. Large, remote-controlled electric robots are slowly crawling along the beach, collecting plastic and other trash. This robot he calls BeBot and The Watershed Center Grand Traverse Bay is one of his two organizations in Michigan. The organization will have one robot and his PixieDrone as part of its efforts to combat pollution and educate people on the Great Lakes. Publicly about the dangers of lake plastic.
The Watershed Center and Grand Valley State University received a $1 million donation from Meijer and loaned robots from the Great Lakes Regional Foundation Council as part of the Great Lakes Plastic Cleanup Project. The joystick-operated BeBot has a front end originally designed to detect land mines, is easy to maneuver on different types of terrain, and is equipped with a sieve that separates and collects debris from sand. . The PixieDrone works equally well underwater, collecting all forms of floating waste including organics, plastics, glass, metals, paper, fabric, rubber, and more.
Robots are in use in Canada, but the two test sites in Michigan (along with two other Midwest locations) are the first in-state deployments on the Great Lakes. “This is a new device,” says Christine Chrismann, Executive Director of the Watershed Centre. “We are experimenting with it to see how well it works, what it does and how we can improve the next version. We’ll see the learning process, and we’ll also look at how well they’re helping educate people.”
According to Chrisman, education is a key benefit BeBot and PixieDrone offer. Robots are getting a lot of attention. Watershed He said that staff at the center have only a handful of times publicly tested the robots, but passers-by often stop to ask what the machines are and what they do. As such, the Watershed Center provides an ideal opportunity to talk about beach pollution and how it flows into the Great Lakes, Chrisman says. ingested by wildlife.
“This is the biggest achievement[with the use of robots]from the Watershed Center perspective, and education and outreach going forward,” says Chrisman. “It draws people in because of how cool it is and the fact that it’s a robot you drive. You can have a conversation. Machines themselves can’t solve the plastic problem, but they can out Reach helps keep plastic pollution down.” Part of the Watershed Center’s work over the winter will be to create educational materials that staff can distribute when the robots are put into public use next summer. Chrisman says.
The Watershed Center plans to deploy robots at dozens of marinas and beaches next year, from Traverse City to Greyrickville to Elk Rapids to Sutton’s Bay. “We want to find different scenarios for deployment,” Chrisman says. “They’re using a different type of machine, so I’d like to see if (the robots) are picking up what they’re missing after the city goes out with Raker. I would like to go to some communities that can’t do frequent cleanings and some lake associations that have small beaches. We want to see if there are areas (with more serious contamination) that we should focus on.”
Larger machines can collect a fair amount of trash before reaching capacity, but a typical cleaning staff may empty the robot many times to clean large areas of beaches and bodies of water. It will provide another educational opportunity by showing the public the amount and type of trash being collected at local beaches and marinas, Chrisman says. “I pick up rocks, twigs, cigarette butts, goose droppings, pieces of plastic, anything bigger than a dime,” she says. “The aim is to cover specific stretches of the beach in an orderly back-and-forth manner, laying down a tarp and sorting the debris so that it can be sorted into the main types of debris.”
Whether it’s a beach-cleaning robot or a high-tech watershed monitoring system, Chrisman says technology is becoming increasingly important in the fight against the environment. “Kids Her Clique is a great example of that,” she says. “It’s been on the water bottleneck list for years. We’ve spent millions of dollars restoring some of it, but we’re still seeing the same problem of missing insect colonies.” We need to show what is causing it and that it is a problem that needs to be addressed.” The Watershed Center was recently able to install a monitoring system that collects live data from Kids Creek. As an example, this shows in real-time the moment a US-31 water main break begins to affect a watershed and how it changes different levels of a stream. “All that data is the only reason we get funding to do something about it,” Chrisman says.
More technological advances could come to the region. “We have been monitoring water quality for almost 30 years, so one of the interesting things about these new technologies and new partnerships is knowing the history of[what needs to be solved].” says Chrisman. “For example, we have Linsink in the Bay. We always wondered why it was there. We could easily get here in a year.The problem we’re dealing with today is much more complex, watershed-wide systems.This kind of technology is only possible in larger and more complex watersheds that affect watersheds. It will be game-changing for some of the issues.”
