High hopes for Ottawa beach-cleaning robot

An Ottawa woman is combining her interest in robotics with her desire to improve our environment.

Erin Kennedy, an inventor and founder of Robot Missions, can be seen many Saturdays picking up garbage at Westboro Beach with her robot Bowie, although it's Bowie which does most of the work.

She told Ottawa Today with Mark Sutcliffe, the robot weighs about as much as a heavy bag of groceries and is made entirely of pieces generated from a 3D printer (with the exception of a few electronic and mechanical and electronic pieces).

Kennedy operates Bowie remotely right now, but is working to make it fully autonomous this summer.

The idea is to program a pathway for the bot to follow, and for it to be able to identify pieces of trash and pick them off the sand all on its own.

Kennedy's goal is to put one of these robots in every Ontario park by 2030, to help out with a number of environmental tasks.

“The fun thing about these robots is they're sort of a platform, where you can interchange different modules onto them,” she explained. “Right now, Bowie has a scoop. But it could also have, for example, a seed dispenser to disperse wild flower seeds or grass seeds. Or even a soil moisture probe with water so that it could detect areas of grass that need watering and then water it.”

Kennedy said she built Bowie through a lot of self-learning and experimentation, and now she's running into a lot of people who are interested in robotics and are also thinking of how they can apply technology to solve real world issues.

The inventor is inviting anyone who is interested in her project to come to Westboro Beach Tuesday between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. for the Westboro Beach Opener. 

More details about the Bowie project can be found at robotmissions.org, and yes, the bot is named after the late David Bowie.

Listen to the full conversation with Erin Kennedy: