AI Cleanup Robot Takes On Floating Waste Along Pasig River

(SPOT.ph) Pasig River has spent years trying to shake off its bad rep for murky waterways, floating trash, and riverbank stench—the kind of image that haunts a city even when progress is already underway. Pasig City is now betting on a small piece of technology to help push that progress forward: an autonomous cleanup robot called Clearbot.

Launched in October through a collaboration with the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority (MMDA) and with support from the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the Clearbot “Alligator” model is an AI-powered and fully electric vessel built for narrow, heavily obstructed waterways used in cleanup efforts along the Pasig River and connected waterways.

Each Clearbot deployed in Pasig City can reportedly collect up to 500 kilograms of waste in a single run and run for up to eight hours on one charge.

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Clearbot can be controlled remotely or run autonomously. It uses cameras and AI-driven software to scan the water’s surface for debris. Once it detects debris or thick vegetation, it automatically steers toward it, pulling material in through a front conveyor system. Because it’s electric, it also runs without fuel and operates with zero direct emissions.

City officials have emphasized that the robot is meant to work alongside existing cleanup teams—not replace them—by making operations “faster, safer and more efficient” while generating data for planning. By clearing smaller esteros more consistently, it may ease the volume of floating waste that eventually reaches the main river.

What’s interesting about Clearbot is that it doesn’t just scoop up trash—it documents everything it encounters. As it moves along the water, the robot uploads pictures and GPS-tagged data on the waste it collects.

“As the boat goes around, it is able to post data and pictures of all the garbage along the river with GPS location,” Clearbot co-founder Sidhant Gupta told GMA News Online. "So it can actually tell you how many bottles were retrieved, how much plastic, all kinds of different materials have been collected at various points along the river. This helps us map and create a digital twin, where we can actually figure out where the hot spots are and how can we focus our energy to create maximum impact.”

Clearbot’s deployment is part of the broader rehabilitation work happening along the Pasig River corridor, but the tech itself isn’t a brand-new experiment. Founded in 2019, Clearbot began as a student project focused on helping collect marine rubbish in Indonesia before expanding into a startup that builds autonomous, electric and solar-charged cleanup vessels for use in harbors, lakes, and rivers in Asia.

Clearbot will also be demonstrated in San Juan this December, with the entire pilot phase running until January 2026 to evaluate how effective the robots are in local conditions.

Also read: The Pasig River Just Got Its First E-Ferry—and You Can Ride It Soon