Hong Kong-based inventor's breakthrough robotic boat aims to clean-up oceans
A Hong Kong-based environmentalist and inventor is developing special boats with shape-shifting hulls to help clean-up the oceans
A Yuen Long farm an hour from the sea may not seem like the ideal location for a boat workshop, but it's where French-Japanese environmentalist and inventor Cesar Harada is based.
That's where he is designing and building unique robotic boats with shape-shifting hulls and the ability to clean-up oil spills. The hull changes shape to control the direction "like a fish", Harada, 30, says. It is effectively a second sail in the water, so the boat has a tighter turning circle and can even sail backwards.
Our first boat really looked like this ugly, strange, blind salamander
"I hope to make the world's most manoeuvrable sailboat," he says. "The shape-shifting hull is a real breakthrough in technology. Nobody has done it in a dynamic way before."
Harada hopes one day a fleet of fully automated boats will patrol the oceans, performing all sorts of clean-up and data-collection tasks, such as radioactivity sensing, coral reef imaging and fish counting.
Asia could benefit greatly because, Harada says, the region has the worst pollution problems in the world. Yet the story of his invention started in the Gulf of Mexico, following one of the most devastating environmental disasters in recent years - the 2010 BP oil spill. Harada was working in construction in Kenya when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology hired him to lead a team of researchers to develop a robot that could clean-up the oil.
He spent half his salary visiting the gulf and hiring a fisherman to take him to the oil spill. More than 700 repurposed fishing boats had been deployed to clean-up the slick, but only 3 per cent of the oil was collected.
