Roboat units are autonomous, electric and modular boats that can alleviate pressure from Amsterdam's inner city in numerous ways. For example, think about transporting people or goods, or picking up garbage. Thanks to their modular design, Roboat units can be linked together to form a temporary bridge or a stage on the water.
“Thanks to the crane, we can start conducting experiments with Roboat regularly. For now, tests will take place in the inner harbor of Marineterrein Amsterdam, but in the future, we hope to expand our tests to other parts of the city.”
Ynse Hendrik Deinema
Former Roboat Project Coordinator at AMS Institute
The Roboat project is a collaboration between AMS Institute and MIT Senseable City Lab and tested at Marineterrein Amsterdam Living Lab (MALL). MALL is a test area for scalable urban innovation.
In earlier research phases, scale models of the Roboat were already tested at the Marineterrein. The launch of the new slewing crane marks the start of a new phase of experimentation, as the full-scale Roboat can now easily be launched in the water.
As of now visitors of Marineterrein Amsterdam will be able to see Roboat in action in the inner harbour of the area.
“How to deal with scarce space is an issue for many cities, and this certainly also applies to Amsterdam. A big part of the city consists of water surface, so it makes sense to make use of this. It is therefore great that at Marineterrein experiments with innovations such as Roboat take place and that here it is investigated whether autonomous transport is possible on the canals.”
Deputy Mayor Victor Everhardt | City of Amsterdam
“In the Roboat project, we are researching different use cases for the application of autonomous transport over water in the city of Amsterdam. We could use Roboat for waste collection in the inner city and e.g. for transport of people. For water-rich cities like Amsterdam, autonomous transport by water offers interesting opportunities to improve urban infrastructure.”
Stephan van Dijk
Director of Innovation
