Cornell’s snail-inspired Mollusca robot filters microplastics from water as NY teachers bring the technology into K-12 classrooms

In late July 2026, 43 New York state schoolteachers gathered in a conference room at Cornell’s Upson Hall, staring at piles of wires, circuit boards, and 3D-printed parts. Their task: assemble a small aquatic robot modeled on the locomotion of a snail.

The robot is called Mollusca. Professor Sunny Jung of Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences designed it to filter microplastic particles from surface water. Built through a collaboration among Cornell, New York Sea Grant, Princeton University, and the University of Michigan, the device is now moving from research labs into K-12 classrooms across New York state.

Teachers build and test the Mollusca robot at Cornell workshop

The two all-day sessions — one at Cornell’s Ithaca campus, one in New York City — drew 43 teachers total. Jung opened with a lesson on snail biology before participants moved to the back tables, where disassembled robot components were waiting. Every teacher left with a working Mollusca.

NYSG Great Lakes literacy specialist Nate Drag runs the workshops and handles the translation of highly technical research into age-adaptable lesson plans.

Testing happened in a kiddie pool filled with nurdles — the small plastic pellets used as raw material in plastic manufacturing. The setup was deliberately low-tech, and that was the whole point. If teachers could troubleshoot a robot in a conference room, their students could do the same in a classroom with no specialized equipment.

Now in its second year, the workshop is run jointly by Cornell, New York Sea Grant, Princeton, and the University of Michigan. The first cohort of 25 teachers completed the program in July 2025. This summer’s sessions more than doubled that number.

How the Mollusca robot works and why snail biology inspired its design

Aquatic snails move and feed using a single foot in a continuous undulating motion — one that can draw in particles from a distance up to ten times the snail’s body length without the animal ever swallowing the surrounding water in bulk. Jung saw a direct application for microplastics collection and built a robotic version of the same mechanism.

The result pulls surface water inward and passes it through a filter that captures microplastic particles. Simple principle, but replicating it mechanically took real engineering work.

NOAA’s Marine Debris Program funded the initial development in 2024. Three 12-by-12-inch prototypes have since logged 80 hours of testing in a lab pool at Cornell. Kirstin Petersen, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, is now studying whether a swarm of the robots could generate flows that make collection significantly more efficient.

Research partnerships aim to scale the technology for Great Lakes deployment

The project spans three universities, each team working on a different piece of the scaling problem. At Princeton, Michelle DiBenedetto is analyzing how to optimize Mollusca’s performance under varying wave dynamics — a critical variable for any open-water deployment. At the University of Michigan, Maha Haji is designing larger versions of the system built specifically for the Great Lakes, which is a very different engineering challenge than a lab pool.

Petersen is candid about what the robot can and can’t do. “It might not be the right way to get all the microplastics out of the oceans,” she said, “but you can sample really well.” Scientists currently lack reliable data on where microplastics actually concentrate in waterways, and Mollusca could help fill that gap. The project has also spun off field robotics research with broader applications to lakes and open-water environments.

Classroom implementation: Student outcomes and teacher feedback

Emily Colletta runs the gifted and talented program at North Tonawanda Intermediate School. She built an entire three-month unit around the Great Lakes and the Mollusca research — her sixth graders covered the geography of the lakes, climate change, biomimicry, and existing trash-capture technology before building the robots themselves.

“They tested the robots and made observations and then were able to 3D-print their own modification to improve it,” Colletta said. Nurdles wash up near her school from a nearby plastics factory, which made the connection to students’ own community immediate and concrete.

At Tapestry Charter High School in Buffalo, AP Biology teacher Taryn Matteson reported full student engagement. Some went further, incorporating their plastic-capture designs into college scholarship applications. Matteson paired the Mollusca project with a separate NYSG workshop on LittaTraps — devices that collect trash in storm drains — so students could examine plastic collection at both macro and micro scales. The art class turned the collected trash into an art project.

NYSG Great Lakes literacy specialist Nate Drag runs the workshops and handles the translation of highly technical research into age-adaptable lesson plans. He described the experience as expanding his own skills in robotics and coding. Funding cuts have paused plans for a third year, but Drag says the capacity he’s built isn’t going away.

Background: The growing microplastics problem driving the research

Scientists project that the quantity of microplastics in the environment could double by 2040, according to the Cornell Chronicle. The particles have already been detected in at least 1,300 species and throughout the human body, with mounting evidence of harmful health impacts. In April 2026, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency added microplastics to its official list of contaminants — a signal that regulatory attention is increasing.

The teacher-training model is designed to extend the reach of the research well beyond the lab. Petersen put it directly: a typical outreach event might reach 20 people for an hour, whereas this program follows teachers across a full school year, and each teacher reaches dozens of students. Researchers call it the “multiplicative effect.” With 68 teachers trained across two years, that math adds up fast.

Kelly Lippke

Kelly is an experienced writer with 15 years of experience exploring the big stories that shape our world, from tech breakthroughs and space exploration to climate, energy, and the fascinating quirks of science. She has a talent for turning complex ideas into sharp, memorable insights that stay with readers long after they’ve finished reading.