Pay a visit to the Chicago River and you'll find that it has a wonderful new addition to the local wildlife. Among the birds and fish, visitors may spot a small robot moving up and down the busy waterway. This is Trashbot, the creation of a startup called Urban Rivers, using cutting-edge technology to clean up trash in the area.

In some ways, Trashbot is like the vacuum cleaners (真空吸收器) found in American homes. But it isn't. While its free movement and lack of onsite handlers may give the impression that this is a self-driving machine, this could not be further from the truth. At any point in time, Trashbot might be controlled by one of the Internet users.

Anyone with a web connection can get into Urban River's website and take a two-minute turn at piloting Trashbot. The company's goal is to use this time to direct Trashbot to pick up trash, and then carry this to a collection point on the river bank, where it can be later removed.

The idea for Trashbot started a few years ago when Urban Rivers' project the "floating gardens" on the Chicago River got clogged up (被堵塞) with trash. To solve this, they started employing old-fashioned human litter pickers to collect trash from the river. However, this turned out to be ineffective.

The idea of a robot boat was born then, but the team wasn't sure how to pilot it. Teaching a computer to understand what trash is isn't easy, Trash is a somewhat abstract concept (概念) . We know it when we see it. At this point they decided to turn to the Internet for help.

"We figured that we could put out a call so that this boat could be controlled by people around the world," says Nick Wesley, one of the brains behind the project. "Letting people take control of a robot to clean up trash makes for a really cool experience."