Alongside the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions, the team also created navigation and control algorithms to update the communication and collaboration among the boats. "Roboat II navigates autonomously using algorithms similar to those used by self-driving cars, but now adapted for water," says MIT Professor Daniela Rus, a senior author on a new paper about Roboat and the director of CSAIL. "We're developing fleets of Roboats that can deliver people and goods, and connect with other Roboats to form a range of autonomous platforms to enable water activities." Self-driving boats have been able to transport small items for years, but adding human passengers has felt somewhat intangible due to the current size of the vessels. Roboat II is the "half-scale" boat in the growing body of work, and joins the previously developed quarter-scale Roboat, which is 1 meter long.

Researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) say they've created an autonomous river vessel -- Roboat II -- that's capable of carrying passengers across fast-moving bodies of water. It's the latest addition to a fleet of autonomous boats developed by CSAIL, MIT Senseable City Lab, and the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS) over the last five years. As MIT's Rob Matheson explained in a recent blog post, the Roboats -- rectangular hulls packing sensors, thrusters, microcontrollers, cameras, and other hardware -- emerged from the ongoing project. The goal is to create robot fleets that can ferry people and goods through Amsterdam's 160 canals and self-assemble into bridges to help reduce pedestrian congestion. Roboat II measures 2 meters long (6 feet) and can carry up to six passengers at a time.

We've heard plenty about the potential of autonomous vehicles in recent years, but MIT is thinking about different forms of self-driving transportation. For the last five years, MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Senseable City Lab have been working on a fleet of autonomous boats to deploy in Amsterdam. Last year, we saw the autonomous "roboats" that could assemble themselves into a series of floating structures for various uses, and today CSAIL is unveiling the "Roboat II." What makes this one particularly notable is that it's the first that can carry passengers. The boat is pretty small, only two meters long, and can carry two passengers through the canals of Amsterdam.