About 50 tons of floating debris – plastics, wood, cardboard, organic material, mooring lines – are collected every year from the docks in Belgium’s port of Antwerp. Not only does this waste pollute the waters, but it also has an impact on biodiversity and can cause damage to ships. This is why port authorities are now turning to drones to detect and clean up the debris as soon as possible.
The port of Antwerp spans more than 120 km², which makes screening the area thoroughly a challenge for cleanup crews. However, a new machine vision application based on drone images can automatically populate a map to indicate where floating waste is present. Since drones can fly over the entire port area several times a day, debris can be located and cleaned up more quickly and efficiently.
This efficiency will be enhanced further once 5G is deployed to support the live streaming of drone images. The ambition is to develop a network of autonomous drones that can…
