Roboat Prototypes

Roboat, a collaboration between the MIT Senseable City Lab and the City of Amsterdam, set out to build a fleet of modular self-driving boats that could carry passengers and collect waste. My part was turning that idea into hardware that actually worked on a canal.

I built prototypes at increasing scale. The 1:4 models had 3D-printed and fiberglass hulls with CNC-milled tops, enough to test sensor clusters and a drive-by-wire system indoors. The 1:2 models added gyroscopes and custom telemetry dashboards for outdoor path-following. The full-size boats were welded aluminum and symmetrical, with four motors (two main, two bow thrusters) so they could move sideways and diagonally in tight spaces.

Water is hostile to autonomy: lidar refracts, and currents keep pushing you off course. The biggest design call was the hull. The early assumption was a catamaran for stability; I argued for a monohull to maximize payload. Working with a naval engineer, I ran simulations on weight distribution, drag, and turning radius, and the data backed the single hull. It became the layout for both the passenger and the waste-collection boats.

That prototyping work helped secure €25 million in funding from the City of Amsterdam. I then managed manufacturing of the full-size vessels, which were deployed in the canals, and the research spun out into an independent company, Roboat.Tech.