FROM THE INDUSTRY
Autonomous floating craft
Robot boats to revolutionize water traffic
in metropolises
About a quarter of the
Amsterdam area is covered by
water. Canals and waterways,
known as grachts, run through
the urban area of the Dutch
metropolis. They have always
been the arteries of transport,
being used to move both
goods and people, and in
the past they were also used
to change over from sea
to inland freight. And you
can also live on the water,
provided you have a suitable
houseboat. It’s no wonder
that in this cosmopolitan city,
a great deal of focus is on
waterway traffic. Together
with MIT (the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology)
and the Dutch universities
of Wageningen and Delft,
the Amsterdam Institute
for Advanced Metropolitan
Solutions (AMS) is developing
a whole fleet of autonomous
boats to meet a wide range of
requirements.
Also works
without a
helmsman:
Transporting
people and
goods
Self-propelled,
autonomously acting boats
that can transport goods or
dispose of waste can even be
connected to form temporary
bridges and can also carry out
temperature, water quality, and
air quality measurements –
there’s no shortage of tasks
for the floating robots.
AMS experts and their
scientific companions have
been researching the “Roboat”
for three years. The project
behind it is intended to
run for five years and is
supported with a budget of
€ 25 million. This is not only
an exciting development
for the metropolis on the
Amstel river; many of the
world’s major cities are
located on sea shores or large
lakes, and have extensive
waterways that could be used
intelligently.
ams-institute.org
The ideas
turbo ignited
Patent numbers explode
Germany, the land of diesel and
combustion mobility? A figure
published by the German Patent
and Trademark Office illustrates how rapidly
one of the key technologies of this high-tech
location is being transformed. In Germany
alone, 660 patents directly related to vehicles
with electric drives were registered in 2019. This
is an increase of 42 percent.
In the electric vehicle power supply sector,
patent applications rose by 41 percent. This
puts Germany well ahead of the rest of the
world. Almost half of all patent applications
for electric drive systems in 2019 came from
Germany.
epo.org
The robot wins
Autonomous cleaning staff on rollers fight against pathogens
Hospitals are places where patients
should be protected as much
as possible from environmental
influences in order to recover. It is
therefore important that aggressive
pathogens do not stand a chance
there. And the personnel on site also
need to be protected.
Plans to use automated helpers
to keep viruses and bacteria in
check have been around for some
time. The Danish company Blue
Ocean Robotics specializes in
service robots, and it launched an
autonomously operating robot way
back in 2014 that was designed
to kill germs with UV-C light. The
ultraviolet radiation of the “UVD
Robot” is not visible to the human
eye, but destroys microbial germs
extremely effectively.
The self-propelled virus killer
from Odense is currently attracting
particular attention, as it is being
used in dozens of applications in
the current fight against COVID-19 in
several Chinese hospitals.
uvd-robots.com
The Phoenix Contact innovation magazine UPDATE 5/20 7