One Week, Two Rooms: Antwerp Asks How, Charleroi Asks What Next

In the space of three days this week, the sector asked two different questions about remote operations. In Antwerp, at the second Autonomous Summit during Port of the Future Week, the question was how the technology gets deployed at scale. In Charleroi, at the closing event of the Walloon research project NavAuWall, the question was what four years of research have made possible. We were in both rooms, and the two questions turn out to have the same answer.

The Autonomous Summit at Port of Antwerp-Bruges brought roughly 30 technology demonstrators in front of policymakers and port companies. Remotely operated inland vessels stood alongside remotely operated rail, yard robots, drones for terminal equipment inspection and freight vehicles running on public roads. WorldCargo News, reporting on the week as a whole, listed Seafar's remote navigation technology among the technologies presented.

What made the day worth attending was not the hardware. It was the framing. The organisers positioned this edition as the step past the pilot project, and the speakers followed. Rob Smeets, chief executive of Port of Antwerp-Bruges, put the driver plainly.

That is the same diagnosis the inland shipping sector has been making for two years, now said out loud by the port authority. Smeets added that the point of the day was to show that the future has already started. The federal mobility minister, Jean-Luc Crucke, set the condition: the opportunity is real, and the roll-out has to happen safely, responsibly and within a sound legal framework. At the Rotterdam end of the week, Bo Cerup-Simonsen of the Maersk Mc-Kinney Moller Center for Zero Carbon Shipping reduced the scaling problem to four words: standardisation is the name of the game.

VRT NWS caught the detail that makes the abstraction concrete. Its report described a vessel sailing in the port of Antwerp while being controlled from Liege. That is the whole proposition in one sentence: the vessel is here, the qualified person is there, and the distance between them is a network connection rather than a compromise.

Worth noting what that spread means. WorldCargo News and Flows reach the people who buy and regulate this technology. ATV and Radio 1 reach the people whose sons and daughters might consider the job. The crew shortage is partly a visibility problem, and a television report from the quayside does something for that which a trade article cannot.

The next morning, at A6K in Charleroi, the NavAuWall consortium presented the results of four years of work. We coordinated the project; ULiege's ANAST research unit, Multitel, Versus and DN&T were the partners, with support from Logistics in Wallonia and the SPW, under the Walloon Plan Marshall. The project began in October 2022 and runs to the end of September 2026.

The objective was specific, and deliberately not maximalist. NavAuWall set out to get from one Remote Operator per vessel towards one Remote Operator supervising three to six vessels at once, on Walloon canals, with a deckhand remaining onboard. Full removal of the crew was never the target. Two technical problems stood in the way, and both are recognisable from the MARIN risk assessment published last December: reliable detection and avoidance of objects in narrow canal navigation, and a connection that stays up in the places where it matters. Our own contribution was on the second: a communication module on the vessel that combines private 4G and LTE networks with 5G-URLLC, so that the link to the Remote Operation Centre holds along the whole route rather than along most of it.

Charleroi also mattered for a less technical reason. Remote operations in Belgium have been reported largely as a Flemish story, because that is where the first permits and the first Remote Operation Centre were. Wallonia has its own waterway network, its own modal shift ambition in construction materials and waste, and now four years of its own research record. The closing event was the moment that became visible.

Put the two days next to each other and the conclusion writes itself. In Antwerp, a port authority, a federal minister and thirty technology providers agreed that the technology is ready to leave the pilot phase, and that the framework around it decides how fast that happens. In Charleroi, a research consortium closed a project that proved a specific capability, and handed the question of what to do with it to the same framework.

That is the same message six inland fleets delivered in February, and the same one KPMG put to the Dutch ministry in December. Four outlets in one week, two regions, one gap. The technology is not what is holding this up.

• 'Port of the Future Week shifts focus from pilots to deployment', WorldCargo News, September 2026.
• Julie Desmet, 'Autonomous Summit: Autonome technologie vooruit, beleid hinkt achterop', Flows, 16 September 2026.
• 'Hoe ziet de haven van de toekomst eruit? Vandaag kreeg u een voorproefje te zien', ATV, 16 September 2026.
• 'Haven van de toekomst', Weetikveel, Radio 1, 16 September 2026, 39 minutes. Presenter Kobe Ilsen, guest Maarten Weyn.
• 'Van zelfrijdende vrachtwagens tot vanop afstand bestuurde treinen: Antwerpse haven toont dat de toekomst al begonnen is', VRT NWS, 16 September 2026.
• NavAuWall project, coordinated by Seafar with ULiege-ANAST, Multitel, Versus and DN&T, October 2022 to September 2026, under the Walloon Plan Marshall.