Autonomous Driving Goes Beyond Cars With The 'Roboat' Project

Ford Motor Company F, General Motors Company GM, Tesla Motors Inc TSLA, Alphabet Inc GOOGL GOOG, Uber, Mobileye NV MBLY and Delphi Automotive PLC DLPH are some of the most notorious players in the autonomous driving race.

However, they're not the only ones in the field.

On Monday, MIT and Amsterdam's Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions announced they were joining the run, although their angle is quite different. The institutions have come together to assess the viability of creating self-driving boats.

The project, dubbed Roboat, is aimed at the creation of “a fleet of autonomous boats for the transportation of goods and people,” said MIT professor and Roboat’s lead investigator Carlo Ratti. The ambitious team will not stop there.

“[Imagine] dynamic and temporary floating infrastructure like on-demand bridges and stages, that can be assembled or disassembled in a matter of hours,” he added.

Other goals of this €25 million (roughly $27.9 million) program include environmental protection, the detection of diseases in the water and removal of bicycles from canals – although this might sound a bit weird, about 12,000 bikes fall into Amsterdam’s canals every year.

According to USA Today, the Roboat team is aiming at testing the first prototypes in Amsterdam as soon as next year.