An Indian robotics student in Abu Dhabi has developed robots to help protect marine life, an innovation he hopes will be implemented on a bigger scale in the UAE.

Sainath Manikandan, a student at GEMS United Indian School, built the Marine Robot Cleaner (MBot Cleaner) that helps preserve the marine environment and Agriculture Robot (Agribot) that helps to reduce the labour of farmers who work in hot countries like the UAE.

“MBot is a prototype robot that can remove floating wastes from surface water. It is basically shaped like a boat and can be operated remotely with a radio control. It runs with two motors that help the boat move in the water,” Mr Manikandan said.

He added that popsicle sticks are attached to a wheel and then to the third motor to push the waste from the water bodies into the storage basket.

Although this is a more labour intensive alternative to the existing automated surface skimmers that work by floating a network of AI powered skimmers that collect the rubbish to a central point for retrieval. He is hoping his physically smaller device can be used without the need to manually collect the gathered debris or lay out large networks of skimmers. Although this does somewhat limit the size of area Manikandan’s bots can cleanse, they also have to be within a human line of sight which is perhaps the biggest pitfall to the idea. Although drones could be used to remotely guide the bots from a long distance.

“Solar panels can also be used instead of batteries. Although this project could plausibly restore the purity of water, it nevertheless could be the initial step taken forward towards creating a better ecosystem,” he said, adding that developing this robot on a bigger scale, “we can try to preserve our marine species and environment.”