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Just when we’d all got used to the mad concept of self-driving cars, Amsterdam’s taking the whole autonomous vehicle thing to new depths (literally), as the city’s about to start trialling robotic boats. The so-called ‘Roboats’ – dreamed up by the impressively-named Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions, in collaboration with Massachusetts Institute of Technology – won't be your average dinghies, but more like self-driving floating platforms, that can lend themselves to various uses.
These include forming, according to MIT’s Carlo Ratti, ‘floating infrastructure like on-demand bridges and stages, that can be assembled or disassembled in a matter of hours’. The robot boats are set to be trialled throughout the city’s plentiful waterways from this year. Oh, buoy!
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