Surveying and cleaning plastic pollution in the sediment: SILVER+ approach

Nowadays there is growing awareness on the issue of plastic pollution in the oceans. The use of robotic platforms might help increasing our understanding on the problem and possibly contribute to the solution. Recent studies pointed out that the majority of plastic litter eventually sinks to the bottom of the sea, but traditional swimming robots are unsuitable to carry out a systematic survey to validate this claim due to their limitations in the interaction with the seabed. For this reason we developed SILVER+, a platform for investigating the presence of micro and macro plastics litter in the sediment and possibly undertaking cleaning actions. SILVER stands for Seabed Interaction Legged Vehicle for Exploration and Research and it features an hexapod robot, SILVER2, which harnesses the interaction with the seabed to move and operate in the benthic environment. In this paper we present the general architecture of the SILVER+ platform, the design and development of SILVER2 and the results of preliminary tests to assess the effectiveness of the platform to effectively operate in the benthic environment.