Roboat: Autonomous Canal Boats Research Program
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MIT and Amsterdam's AMS Institute ran a five-year (2016-2021) research program building full-scale autonomous electric boats for the city's canals, using LIDAR and cameras to test passenger transport, waste collection, and water-quality sensing. The full-scale prototype, carrying up to five passengers, was unveiled in October 2021 at Marineterrein Amsterdam. The team then spun off as an independent company (2023), now supplying crew-assistance automation to Amsterdam's GVB ferry fleet rather than driverless canal transport.
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The strongest source is the operator's or the city's own reporting — an official report, dataset or press release. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →Sources
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📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Roboat: Autonomous Canal Boats Research Program” — Amsterdam, Netherlands. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/amsterdam-roboat/ (last verified 2026-07-20). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.