Team Lead: Michael Choi
Additional Team Members: Ricardo Rodriguez, Adam Grose, Selina Guan, Arina Romanova, Dan Li, Richard Alves, Rafael Ramirez
PCBB (Passive Cleaner Boat Bot) is a project created by Senior Engineering students at UC Santa Cruz. We are designing a passive system to prevent the accumulation of macro waste entering the ocean from city runoffs. The boats will not actively search for and clean existing waste that is present in the ocean, but will work as a barrier that is stationed close to the coast near water entryways. The system is comprised of two solar-powered autonomous boat bots connected by a nonintrusive net that rests on the surface of the water.
With the support from Idea Hub, it has provided us with most of the necessary materials for our first boat bot. The project used the funding support from Idea Hub for the autonomous sub-team however parts for the boat and the power subteam will require the other half of support funding from Idea Hub. The boat material has been narrowed down in the scope of the project due to lack of a fabrication lab, therefore our team will purchase the first boat for the testing of our proof of concept of macro plastic prevention. To achieve our deliverable, the team had decided to contact possible sponsors to ease the cost of attaining. Working with Opers in testing the net system and autonomous system allows us to test our standard operation procedure design to validate our proof of concept and further develop the complete product of our Passive Cleaner Boat bot. The PCBB team would have never attained this opportunity without the support from Idea Hub ’s committee board.
Follow the team and their progress!
Twitter: https://twitter.com/PCBBot
Email: PCBBot@gmail.com