Project Kymarion
An ISEF autonomous surface vehicle designed to map nearshore microplastic accumulation at current-convergence zones along the Massachusetts coast — using low-cost GPS-tagged sensors and hydrodynamic modeling to find where plastic piles up.
The Problem
Microplastics are distributed unevenly across coastal waters, but predicting where they concentrate is hard. We hypothesize that sites where opposing nearshore currents converge act as natural traps — accumulating floating plastic debris the same way they accumulate biological matter. If the pattern is real and predictable, it opens the door to targeted capture station deployment rather than expensive, spray-and-pray ocean cleanup.
Existing research on coastal microplastic distribution relies on manual trawl sampling, which is too sparse to characterize convergence-zone dynamics. We needed a cheap, repeatable, GPS-accurate survey platform that could run 15–20 waypoints per deployment without requiring a crew.
The Vehicle
Kymarion is a low-cost catamaran-hull ASV built around open-source autopilot firmware. Each hull houses a bilge pump thruster; a Raspberry Pi flight controller runs ArduPilot in GUIDED mode to execute GPS waypoint missions autonomously. A custom sensor payload samples water during transit.
| Hull | Twin PVC catamaran, ~90 cm LOA |
| Propulsion | 2× bilge pump thrusters, differential steering |
| Autopilot | ArduPilot (Rover) on Raspberry Pi |
| Navigation | GPS + compass, waypoint missions via MAVLink |
| Sensor payload | Niskin-style water sampler, turbidity + conductivity probes |
| Power | 3S LiPo, ~2 hr endurance per charge |
| Mission profile | 15–20 GPS waypoints, ~500 m survey transect |
| Cost | < $400 total build |
Methodology
- Identify candidate convergence zones along the Massachusetts coast using NOAA current charts and satellite SST data.
- Deploy Kymarion on repeated survey transects at each site; collect GPS-tagged water samples and in-situ sensor data.
- Quantify microplastic concentration from samples via microscopy and spectroscopy (FTIR).
- Compute a convergence-strength metric for each site from current velocity field data.
- Run ANOVA across site categories and regression of microplastic concentration against convergence strength to test the hypothesis.
Tech & Tools
Timeline
Resources
Paper and full build guide will be posted here as the project matures. Check back closer to the ISEF submission window.