Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands, has become famous for it’s elaborate canal system. Nicknamed the “Venice of the North”, there are 165 canals throughout the city. So it comes as no surprise that the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS Institute) would support studies devoted to the city’s canal systems. In 2019 AMS entered a 5 year joint program with students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to build drones that can act as bridges atop of Amsterdam’s canals called Roboats.

The driving force behind these drones stems from a desire to use emerging technology to re-imagine urban infrastructures. Amsterdam’s canals are becoming increasingly more congested with people and debris. The purpose of the Roboats would be to eliminate some of this congestion by serving as pop-up bridges, pop-up food or flower vendors, or even floating garbage collectors. The project is being led by MIT Professor Carlo Ratti, the world famous Italian engineer and architect who has been shaping the way cities are becoming modernized environments.

The Roboats are rectangular structures that can float across the surface of the water. They are able to configure into different patterns and collect environmental data. Each device is equipped with cameras, GPS, sensors, thrusters, and micro-controllers. They can work independently or link up to one another to work as a larger unit. The GPS, sensors, and cameras allow the drone to autonomously navigate without colliding into each other or other obstacles. The thrusters and micro-controllers provide power and directional steering. Research on this project began in 2016 when the team at MIT first tested a prototype that could move laterally, forwards, and backwards on the water along a predetermined route. Next a low cost, mini, 3D printed Roboat was made to improve agility and efficiency. These mini Roboats also had advanced trajectory-tracking algorithms.

Most recently the collaborating teams have developed a way for the Roboats to connect and separate with each other to form multi use platforms. Daniela Rus, director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, is one of the MIT leads on this project. They have been testing the Roboats in a pool at MIT where the drones zigzag and reconnect without bumping into anything. “We’ve enabled the roboats to now make and break connections with other roboats, with hopes of moving activities on the streets of Amsterdam to the water,” says Rus.

The next step to get the Roboats ready for the canals in Amsterdam is to scale them up to size while maintaining the delicate balance of safety measures. The current models they are testing in the pool are only 1 meter long and half a meter wide. Not nearly large enough to support a system Rus described as, “A set of boats can come together to form linear shapes as pop-up bridges, if we need to send materials or people from one side of a canal to the other. Or, we can create pop-up wider platforms for flower or food markets.” The full sized floating drones will be 4 meters long and 2 meters wide, a size that can increase exponentially when connecting with other units.

The teams hope to test out the Roboats soon as a bridge spanning a 60 meter distance connecting an underdeveloped area to the NEMO Science Museum in Amsterdam’s city center. The time it currently takes to walk around this waterway is 10 minutes. If the Roboats work, they can circulate as a continuous bridge crossing, cutting travel time down to just two minutes. Ratti feels confident that the re-scaling process, including making sure the Roboats can handle human weight and weather conditions, will go smoothly. “This will be the world’s first bridge comprised of a fleet of autonomous boats,” Ratti says. “A regular bridge would be super expensive, because you have boats going through, so you’d need to have a mechanical bridge that opens up or a very high bridge. But we can connect two sides of canal [by using] autonomous boats that become dynamic, responsive architecture that float on the water.”