Case study

Roboat

Roboat is a research program by the MIT Senseable City Lab and the City of Amsterdam that brings autonomy to the city's canals: modular boats that carry passengers, collect waste, monitor water quality, and latch together into temporary floating infrastructure. I led concept design, naval architecture, and hardware prototyping across three generations of vessels.

As the fleet grew from one-meter testbeds to full four-meter vessels, I developed the drive-by-wire architecture, the symmetrical single-hull layout with interlocking latches, and the full-stack telemetry platform that streamed live sensor and control data from the canals. For a deeper look at the naval engineering and manufacturing of the vessels, see Roboat Prototypes.

On the water, much of the work meant compensating for lateral drift in the drive-by-wire loop and tuning perception sensors to distinguish floating debris from swimmers.

The research helped secure €25 million from the City of Amsterdam, spun out as Roboat.Tech, contributed to papers including “Roboat II: A novel autonomous surface vessel for urban environments” and “Design, modeling, and nonlinear model predictive tracking control of a novel autonomous surface vehicle”, and was exhibited at the Museum of the Future in Dubai as part of Tomorrow Today.

Credits

  • MIT

    • Dennis Frenchman — Principal Investigator
    • Carlo Ratti — Principal Investigator
    • Daniela Rus — Principal Investigator
    • Andrew Whittle — Principal Investigator
    • Fábio Duarte — Research Lead
    • Tom Benson — Urban Interfaces
    • Yuan Li — Urban Interfaces
    • Niklas Hagemann — Design and Visualizations
    • Pietro Leoni — Design and Visualizations
    • David Fernandez — Robotics

  • AMS Institute

    • Stephan Van Dijk — Director of Innovation
    • Debby Dröge — Head of Communications
    • Ynse Deinema — Project Manager
    • Peter Trydeman — Business Development Manager
    • Rens Doornbusch — Robotics
    • Javier Alonso-Mora — Robotics
    • Jitske De Vries — Robotics
    • Joshua Jordan — Robotics

Exhibitions

  • 2022

    Tomorrow Today

    Museum Of The Future, Dubai

    with: MIT Senseable City Lab

Press

Publications