Amsterdam is to trial self-driving electric boats to carry out tasks such as collecting rubbish and transporting passengers.
The Dutch capital’s 60 miles of canals have been used for transport since long before cars and trucks powered by polluting internal combustion engines began clogging its narrow roads. Now a project called the Roboat aims to develop new ways of navigating the world’s waterways without a human hand at the wheel.
Stephan van Dijk, the director of innovation at the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions, which is collaborating with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the technology was “very relevant in highly complex port operations, where you have a lot of vessels and a lot of ships and a lot of quays and piers. There you can really improve the safety with autonomous systems, but also make it more efficient and into a 24/7 operations approach.”
At a recent demonstration, one four-metre electric boat sailed past a full-size…