The Robotic Seabed Cleaning Platform: An Underwater Cable-Driven Parallel Robot for Marine Litter Removal

As a contribution to the development of new techniques to remove marine litter from the seabed of sees and oceans, the Robotic Seabed Cleaning Platform has been designed, built and experimented in the framework of the European Union project MAELSTROM. It essentially consists of a floating platform that supports the base elements of a 6 degree-of-freedom cable-driven parallel robot actuated by eight winches. The mobile platform of this robot can work underwater and is equipped with sensors to control its underwater motions and to detect & identify marine litter. To achieve efficient and selective litter removal, an aspiration system and a gripper are installed on the CDPR underwater mobile platform.