Carlo Ratti and his team at MIT's Senseable City Lab have come up with a "bridge" made of continuously circling autonomous boats for a tricky patch of Amsterdam's waterway.
The robot boats, appropriately known as Roboats, use cameras, lidar  ? a detection system that uses laser ?and algorithms to operate without human drivers.
They communicate with each other to calculate the best path around obstacles.

They are a project from the Senseable City Lab, which works at the intersection of technology and urbanism, and the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS Institute).
The groups designed the Roboats to operate in fleets, and the roundAround "bridge" will be one of the first applications of the technology. The boats will bridge the waterway between Amsterdam's city centre and the new development of Marineterrein Amsterdam ? an area currently not suited to permanent infrastructure as it's a through-route for larger boats.

The canal is just 60 metres wide, but without a bridge, it currently takes 10 minutes to walk the almost one kilometre from one side to the other.
RoundAround offers a dynamic, low-commitment alternative. Its boats will move in a continuous circle across the canal, stopping and rerouting when they detect an obstacle in real time.

"Bridging this waterway truly challenges urban engineers, as it's an important fixed mast route for bigger boats," said AMS Institute head of research Stephan van Dijk. "Th...