Josh Keselman

An estimated 11 million tons of plastic waste entered the oceans last year, joining the 200 million tons already crowding Earth’s waterways, per Ocean Conservancy. This waste poses a significant health risk to both humans and marine wildlife. Existing robotic systems for combatting plastic waste are expensive and require significant human support, preventing the kind of large-scale operation needed to combat waste accumulation.

Your browser does not support the video tag.Our project aimed to develop a functional and robust prototype of an autonomous aquatic vehicle for ocean trash collection, with the hope that future iterations of this project could expand our design and develop a plan for mass production. We built a custom catamaran-inspired design featuring two large pontoons attached to a central hull, which contained a mesh net for passive trash collection and our central electronics enclosure. We used a Raspberry Pi 5 for our main controller with an ESP32 and ESCs to control our two brushless DC motors

I worked on setting up our core ROS2 architecture and control system, including developing both our teleoperative motor controller and our autonomous navigation system. I also was the sole developer of our custom vision pipeline, using the Ultralytics YOLO12 library with a custom model trained with images collected from the robot's on-board camera during live testing. I was also a lead author and editor on our final technical report, helping set our style guide and writing a significant portion of our background, software, and results sections.