Microsoft-powered autonomous beach-cleaning robot is here to clean our shores

This little dude is doing good work. Until we can get the human race to stop tossing its trash in places it's not supposed to be, people continue to get creative picking it up. That's exactly the case for Martijn Lukaart and Edwin Bos, two Dutch engineers who started TechTics and built what you see here: BeachBot, or BB for short. With help from Microsoft's artificial intelligence systems, BB is on a mission to rid beaches of cigarette butts and eventually hopes to clean up all other sorts of waste. Microsoft highlighted the startup on Monday, showing off the prototype machine that's still in the process of learning via the software giant's Trove AI system, which helps provide image sets for this kind of machine learning task.