Robots are cleaning up Lake Tahoe. Let’s meet them.

Busy robots are helping clean up Lake Tahoe. Environmental tech companies The Searial Cleaners and Eco-Clean solutions have teamed up to deploy three trash-cleaning robots to trawl the freshwater California-Nevada lake for waste and trash.

On the shore, the solar-powered BeBot sifts through sand to detect and excavate litter buried beneath the surface, such as cigarette butts and bottle caps.

In the lake itself, PixieDrone, with its 160-liter collection capacity, picks up floating waste. Equipped with a camera for monitoring, the mobile robot can float around for up to six hours in autonomous mode, and is controlled via its bespoke WebApp.

Finally, Collec’Thor is a stationary cleaner that can be plugged into docks. The robot can hold up to 100 kilograms of waste and attracts both solid and liquid waste. Once these three automated cleaners collect the trash, volunteers step in to sort and properly dispose of it.

Though there have been cleaning programs through the years, plastic pollution remains a persisting issue for the popular Lake Tahoe, which has some of the world’s highest plastic concentrations.