Beach Cleaning Robot: Rakes, Robot Dogs and ABB

Every summer, beaches collect bottle caps, food wrappers and, above all, cigarette butts, and much of that litter sinks into the sand where a rake cannot see it. A beach cleaning robot tries to find and lift those small pieces without hurting the beach. This post follows the job from volunteers with bags and tractor towed sand sifters to the small electric machines working on the Great Lakes, an Italian robot dog with vacuum feet and a Chinese sifting robot on Hainan. It also looks at where ABB robots could help, mostly behind the scenes.

A tractor pulls a surf rake to clear small debris from a beach at Cape Hatteras National Seashore, 2023. Photo: Cape Hatteras National Seashore, NPS via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Volunteers, rakes and tractor sand cleaners

For most of the twentieth century, beaches were cleaned by hand. Town crews and volunteers walked the tide line with rakes, sacks and pointed sticks, picking up what they could see. Organised cleanups grew from that. In 1986 the group now called Ocean Conservancy held the first International Coastal Cleanup, which has become a yearly event. Hand picking works for bottles and bags. It is slow for cigarette filters and plastic fragments the size of a fingernail, which hide just under the surface.

Volunteers with bags pick up debris on a Cape Hatteras beach in front of beach houses. Photo: Cape Hatteras National Seashore, NPS via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Machines came in the 1960s. Harold S. Barber of Connecticut invented the Surf Rake Model 500 for grooming sandy beaches and founded H. Barber and Sons to sell it. The company says its rakes are now used in more than 90 countries. A Surf Rake is pulled behind a tractor or pickup truck. It picks up litter, seaweed and even tar balls, then levels the sand behind it. Barber's largest model, the 600HD, covers up to nine acres an hour with a seven foot wide path.

A Barber Surf Rake pulled by a John Deere tractor on a beach. Photo: Americasroof / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Tractor sifters made big tourist beaches cleaner, but they have limits. Most pass through only the top inch or two of sand and can miss very small pieces. The tractors that pull them run on diesel or petrol, can harm wildlife and can add to beach erosion. Smaller walk behind sifters, such as Barber's Sand Man, are used in golf bunkers and playgrounds. The basic idea stayed the same: drive or push a sieve through the sand, then empty the hopper.

A tractor drawn sand cleaner working a beach in Tenerife. Photo: Wouter Hagens / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Robot dogs and electric sifters on the sand today

The newest machines are smaller and smarter. On 26 September 2026 the Times of India described VERO, a robot dog from the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa that vacuumed cigarette butts from a beach test course in 2024, collecting 29 of 37. VERO is built on a Unitree AlienGo quadruped with a vacuum on its back and hoses running down to nozzles on its feet. Its software spots butts on the ground and plans where to step. Interesting Engineering reported in September 2026 on a "beach dog" from Shanghai Jiao Tong University's Hainan research institute, on trial in Sanya.

A Unitree quadruped of the Romanian mountain rescue service, a close relative of the Unitree base VERO is built on. Photo: HotNews Romania / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

That Chinese robot ploughs the sand with teeth, shakes it over a sieve, keeps the rubbish in an onboard bin and rakes the surface flat, covering about 2,000 square metres an hour on a swappable solar charged battery. On the Great Lakes, small electric BeBots built by Poralu Marine with 4ocean dig nearly four inches down and cover about 32,000 square feet an hour, driven by a joystick. Michigan's Department of Natural Resources uses them on smaller beaches, and in September 2026 cleanup robots worked Marquette's South Beach on Lake Superior.

A small walk behind sand cleaning machine sifting a beach. Photo: Beachclean1 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB does not make beach robots, and we found no ABB project on a beach. Its hardware fits around the edges. Sand and salt spray are hard on machines, and the IRB 1300 can be ordered with Foundry Plus 2 protection, sealed against water and dust. An arm like that on a tracked vehicle could reach into rocks or seaweed where a sieve cannot go. Nobody has built one yet, so treat it as an idea. Our post on street sweeping robots covers the urban version of the same problem.

An ABB IRB 1300 with Foundry Plus 2 protection, built to handle water and dust. Photo: ABB

Where beach cleaning robots go next

The recent projects all point toward smaller, lighter machines, because on many beaches wildlife and erosion matter more than speed. Legged robots such as VERO can walk over dunes and around sunbathers, while sifters such as BeBot handle open sand. Vision is improving too. A robot that can tell a cigarette butt from a shell, or a bottle cap from a pebble, can pick selectively and leave natural material on the beach. That also means the robot can count what it collects, which is useful for cleanup records.

Cigarette butts and scraps of litter half buried in beach sand. Photo: waferboard / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Factories may see the other half of the job. Litter from cleanups is often counted and sorted for research or recycling, and that is repetitive pick and place work. A delta robot such as ABB's IRB 360 FlexPicker, with a camera and PickMaster software, already sorts small items on moving belts in food plants, and the same setup could in principle sort beach plastic by type. Such cells are usually laid out and tested in RobotStudio before anyone buys hardware. The same cell could weigh and log each piece, giving a town a record of what washed up and when.

ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker delta robots picking items on a moving line. Photo: ABB

At home, a beach robot is unlikely to be a consumer gadget soon. Towns, parks and hotels with private beaches are the buyers, and the open problems are price, durability and safety around children and dogs. Salt and sand wear out joints and sensors quickly, and a robot that walks among swimmers needs reliable obstacle detection. Volunteers will still be needed for the bulk of the work, and the people who run the machines will need to learn how to program and repair them. A town also has to store, charge and move each robot between beaches, jobs that a tractor and trailer already handle.

Programming a GoFa cobot from the FlexPendant touch screen. Photo: ABB

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