Drone boats will soon hit the famous, rusty bike-filled canals of Amsterdam. The city has more than a hundred kilometers of canals that wind their way throughout what is often referred to as the party capital of the world.
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Researchers said on Monday they hope to launch the first prototypes of craft they have christened “roboats” in the Dutch city in 2017.
AMS has collaborated with researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Delft University of Technology and Wageningen University ad Research to create the Roboats. MIT joins with two research institutions in the Netherlands – the Delft University of Technology and Wageningen University and Research Center – as the core academic partners who will use the city as a living laboratory and test bed.
“Imagine a fleet of autonomous boats for the transportation of goods and people”, said Carlo Ratti, MIT professor and principal program investigator.
‘But also think of dynamic and temporary floating infrastructure like on-demand bridges and stages, that can be assembled or disassembled in a matter of hours’.
To be fair, the term has been used before for an autonomous sailboat used in marine surveying.
Professor Arjan van Timmeren, scientific director of the institute leading the project, said the project envisages a high-tech return to the 17th century, Amsterdam’s golden age when its canals were the main throughfare for transporting goods. He says robots in the sewer systems can extract sample data from human waste and then map the spread of various conditions, from influenza to diabetes. According to AMS, it is the first large-scale research that explores autonomous systems on water. The team claims that 60 percent of the world’s population lives near coasts and riverbanks. Rising sea levels caused by global warming also likely to increase the need for this sort of floating technology.
While boats already regularly operate on the waters, the city is now looking to the future of transportation – self-driving boats.
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For example, Roboat is also partnering with the United States city of Boston, where sea levels have risen by 10 inches (25 centimetres) since 1921. Instead of having flood waters overwhelm the city’s defenses, they’d simply be channeled into the newly-converted waterways.
