These Filipino students seem to have found a new and unique way to help clean the environment. These students from De La Salle University have created a semi-autonomous boat that can detect and collect trash from the sea.
The endeavor is named Project PaWiKAN (which means Patches Withdrawn Kept Away from Nature) and it has been chosen as a nominee for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) 2019 Space Apps Challenge. The project will be going head to head other teams on the international level for the global hackathon.
Project PaWiKAN consists of two deployable, semi-autonomous boats that can be driven into the sea to collect trash. Later on, it can be dragged back to the mothership using a net, where people can recycle the trash properly.
The boats work using NASA’s Ocean Surface Current Analysis Real-time data to locate possible garbage patches floating in the ocean, which is equipped with an extended-range radio system, and controlled by a deployment station.
Samantha Maxine Santos, Antonio Miguel Alejo, Grant Lewis Bulaong, and Janos Lance Tiberio are the students behind Project PaWiKAN. The team of electronics and communications engineering students behind the project is called Ocean’s 4.
Check out more about Project PaWiKAN by watching the video below.
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