Edwin Bos savored the rural scenery: the blue sea, the bright sun and his two children were playing on the beach of Scheveningen. The Dutch coast stretches for 4.5 kilometers and is popular with tourists and locals, full of aquatic wildlife and grassy dunes.

But for Bos, all these aesthetic feelings quickly disappeared in a small discovery. It happened when his 4-year-old son dug sand and raised his hand to show his father a new discovery.

"What do I do with it?" the boy asked. Between his fingers, he held a cigarette butt.

"Not good," the father thought.

It turned out that cigarette butts were scattered in the landscape. Boston understood a few things. First, if beach visitors think that stuffing a used filter into the sand means that the dirty debris is now harmless, they need to change their approach. Second, he will find ways to help solve the problem.

Two years later, Bos and his entrepreneurial partner Martijn Lukaart created a mobile beach cleaner that can find cigarette butts, pull them out and put them in a safe trash can. Bos and Lukaart are the co-founders of TechTics, a consulting company based in The Hague dedicated to solving social problems through technology.

Their prototype is called "BeachBot" ("BB" for short), and it uses artificial intelligence (AI) to learn how to better find scattered filters, even if they are partially buried by sand. BeachBot completed a demonstration at Scheveningen Beach during World Cleanup Day last September. Another demonstration is planned for this summer.

"This is such a beautiful place," said Boss, who lives near the beach in Scheveningen. He likes to wander off the beaten track on days when it rains and breeze, it feels like he owns sand. "What surprises me is that all these things are just everywhere.

"The cigarette filter is full of microplastics," he added. "It's terrible, these will eventually appear in nature."

How bad is it? According to a study by US government scientists in February, when water comes into contact with discarded cigarette butts, the filter will leach more than 30 chemical substances that are "highly toxic" to aquatic organisms, and constitute "a major...hazardous waste problem." Some of these chemicals are also related to human cancer, asthma, obesity, autism and low IQ.

Every year, 4.5 trillion cigarette butts end up in the environment. According to a 2019 study by Brazilian scientists, these fiber fragments may take 14 years to decompose and have become "the most common form of personal belongings found on the beach." Along the coastline, they will slowly poison turtles, birds, fish, snails and other creatures.

Unfortunately, many visitors to Scheveningen Beach are familiar with the various trash scattered along the coast-plastic caps, glass bottles, candy wrappers and all those cotton cigarette filters.

Oscar de Grave, a financial education lecturer who lives near the beach in Scheveningen, said: “I want my children to sit on the beach barefoot without any glasses or cigarette butts around.” “A clean beach is right. It’s very important to me."

This goal has been supported by many locals. In order to achieve this goal, the Bos and TechTics team created the first artificial intelligence-based detection algorithm specifically for detecting cigarette butts. They collaborated with students from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands to develop BeachBot, which relies on artificial intelligence to do its work.

But it takes a lot of people to teach a robot how to find its prey. TechTics must show thousands of photos of cigarette butts to the beach rover (especially the AI ​​system), all of which are in various states, such as partially hidden, so that it can recognize and remember them.

To help collect these photos, Bos and the team turned to Microsoft Trove, an application that connects AI developers and photo shooters through a transparent data market. Trove has established a direct photo exchange for fair market value. In this case, people can submit their photos, and TechTics directly pays the contributor 25 cents for each accepted image.

TechTics is seeking to eventually collect 2,000 photos through Trove. So far, it has obtained about 200 useful images.

Christian Liensberger, chief project manager of Trove, Microsoft's garage project, said: "The system learns how to look at pictures like a child recognizes objects for the first time."

Liensberger said that Trove's philosophy is that people should pay for their data (such as the photos they post), not just provide it on social media or communication platforms. There should be control and transparency in the process, allowing people to see how their data is used.

"Through this transparency, many (Trove contributors) feel that they are part of the team, they are doing this together, and they are actually helping," Liensberger said. "It is important for people to contribute to lasting things."

Trove users can choose when to participate. Trove can collect all kinds of data and is currently helping to support various artificial intelligence projects.

Trove's mission is also deeply rooted in Microsoft's commitment to responsible artificial intelligence, which aims to advance artificial intelligence ethically by putting people first.

"This BeachBot is powered by people," Liensberger said.

"The robot does all the errands. It goes to the beach and it is the hero of the cleaning," he added. "But to be clean, it requires all these people to provide it with consistent data input. Without it, the robot will encounter new situations that it does not understand. A machine like this only works for people."

Bos agreed that at Scheveningen Beach, the fastest way to achieve a cleaner coastline is through teamwork between humans and mobile robots.

"This is the most interesting part of our concept-we have human-computer interaction, and the public can help make robots smarter," Boss said.

In the process, when people take and share thousands of photos of cigarette butts polluting the earth, they are also raising their awareness of trash and may first persuade others to stop discarding trash.

"We believe that our robotic solution may ultimately not be the ultimate solution to this problem, because the bigger problem of littering is still human behavior," Boss said. "We must work together to ensure that our beaches are kept clean."

The BeachBot, which is about 80 cm wide, has shown that it can handle part of the work. In its first demonstration, it smoked 10 cigarette butts in 30 minutes. This machine uses four puffy wheels to roll on the sand, using two on-board cameras to look forward (avoid people and objects) and downward.

Once it finds the filter, it lowers the two gripping arms, pushes the sand together and grabs the filter, pulls it up and puts it in the internal trash can. Later, people dumped the trash can into the trash can. The prototype is battery-powered and can currently run for about an hour.

TechTics is now creating two smaller companion robots-"two little assistants"-which only focus on detection. They will eventually work as a trio. The smaller robot will map the beach. When they find a cigarette butt, they can send a message to BeachBot (or other beach cleaning vehicles such as tractors) requesting removal.

The mapping robot will also rely on photos provided through Trove.

"We started with cigarette butts. That is the most littered item in the world," Boss said. "In the future, we hope that robots can detect a range of other garbage." He envisions robots that can work autonomously, powered by solar energy.

These are some new hopes that Bos now has on the beach. In some interviews, he will also bring his own set of fixtures.

In his spare time, Bos takes his children through the Scheveningen dunes, where they use their grippers to collect every trace of trash they find. In an hour of hiking, they can fill up the entire garbage bag.

While wandering, he sometimes imagined those who left these pieces, and they obviously thought that others would clean up their mess. He dreams of a team of robots roaming in the sand, and one day they can teach these people to take better care of their planet.

Above: BeachBot on the boardwalk at Scheveningen Beach. (Courtesy of TechTics.) 

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