Boat Storage Robot: ABB and the Automated Marina

A boat storage robot does a job harbours have done by muscle for thousands of years. It lifts a boat out of the water, puts it somewhere dry and brings it back when the owner wants to go out. Most marinas still do this with a big forklift and a skilled driver, but a handful in Florida now use cranes and shuttles that run largely by computer. This post goes from ancient ship sheds and boathouses to the forklift dry stack that spread from the 1950s, then to the automated marinas of today. It ends with where ABB robots and software could fit in the boat barns of the future, which for now is a possibility.

A dry stack boat storage building beside a marina road in Britain, 2024. Photo: Eirian Evans / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

How boats were hauled out and stored before the boat storage robot

Keeping boats out of the water is an old idea. In Athens, the war fleet lived in ship sheds at the harbours of Piraeus, long covered slipways where crews hauled their triremes up onto land. The sheds protected the wooden hulls from shipworm and kept them from drying out in the sun. Danish archaeologist Bjørn Lovén and the Zea Harbour Project excavated part of the naval base at Zea between 2001 and 2012. By 330/29 BC the sheds at Zea could hold 196 warships, and the excavated sheds were 7 to 8 metres tall and about 50 metres long. Similar shed foundations survive at Sounion, south of Athens.

Remains of ancient ship sheds at Sounion, Greece, photographed in 1991. Photo: Mark Landon / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Small boats got the boathouse. Rowing clubs on the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia built the line of clubhouses now called Boathouse Row, where light racing shells sit on racks indoors and are carried down to the water by hand. Heavier boats needed machines. Boatyards winched them up slipways on cradles, and later bought travel lifts: wheeled gantry cranes that drive over a narrow lifting well, pass straps under the hull and carry the boat to a spot on the hard standing. A travel lift raises its load at around one metre a minute, so nobody uses one for quick launches.

Boathouse Row on the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, around 1915. Photo: Detroit Publishing Co. via Library of Congress / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

According to BoatUS, rack storage began in the 1950s, when boatyards worked out that they could fit more boats into less space by stacking light boats on homemade wooden racks with ordinary warehouse forklifts. In the 1970s manufacturers started building forklifts and racks made for boats, including forklifts with negative lift that could lower a boat below ground level into the water. Steel barns with four, five and even six levels followed. In the 1980s and 1990s some of these buildings added restaurants and shops, and some sold their rack space as "rackominiums" instead of renting it.

A Marine Travelift lifting a fishing boat out of a lifting well. Photo: Ralf Wippern / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

How automated marinas stack boats today

New barns keep going up. On 30 September Marina Dock Age reported that Atlantic Point Marina in Stuart, Florida, is due for completion at the close of the 2027 season, with 350 dry stack slips and 100 docks for boats up to 160 feet. The site was once a test facility for Evinrude outboard motors, and the prefabricated concrete walls of its dry stack building are already standing. The same issue looked back at the Hamilton Harbor Yacht Club in Naples, which GCM Contracting finished in 2008 as the first all-concrete tilt-wall dry stack. Most barns like these still run on forklifts.

Boats stored on open steel racks at Fremantle Fishing Boat Harbour, Australia, 2017. Photo: JarrahTree / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.5 AU)

Port Marina on Fort Lauderdale's 17th Street was, according to its designer Vertical Yachts Storage Systems, the first US dry stack to use a bridge crane in place of a forklift. Laser guidance lets a computer ease boats up to 52 feet long into racks 80 feet up. Gulf Star Marina in Fort Myers Beach runs on ASAR equipment from Austria: a motorized sled lifts each boat out of its concrete cubicle, a crane on rails carries it to an electric launch conveyor, and the boat reaches the water in about seven minutes. F3 Marina in Fort Lauderdale, built in 2021, stores 254 boats with an overhead crane in a building 130 feet tall and retrieves a boat in under five minutes.

A heavy forklift launching a motor boat at the harbour of Portopetro, Mallorca, 2017. Photo: Asurnipal / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB does not build marina stackers, and we found no ABB robot working in a dry stack. Some of its products do the same kinds of jobs elsewhere. ABB's Flexley Mover AMRs carry loads around plants without fixed tracks and find their way with 3D Visual SLAM, a small cousin of a boat shuttle. An IRB 6700 handles heavy, awkward parts, and SafeMove software keeps a robot inside its safe zones when people come near. Using any of them in a marina would be new, so read this as a possibility. ABB robots already work in boat plants, which we covered in our post on boat building robots.

ABB's Flexley Mover P604, an AMR that moves loads around a plant without fixed tracks. Photo: ABB

Where boat storage robots go next

Land is what pushes marinas toward automation. Waterfront plots are expensive, and Port Marina's designer argued that a tall automated barn lets a developer justify a dry stack where a high-rise condominium might otherwise go. Storms push the same way. Gulf Star's concrete building is rated for winds of 200 mph, and boats inside it are sheltered from flying debris in a way boats on open racks are not. Cost is the open question. Marina Dock Age notes that building a bridge crane into the structure makes the building more expensive, and F3 Marina was listed for sale through Colliers in 2025, four years after it was built.

An ABB IRB 6700 lifting a large solar panel at dhp technology. Photo: ABB

For boat owners the change will probably arrive through a phone. You book a launch time, and a crane or shuttle has the boat waiting in the water when you get there. Some of the work around the boat could be automated as well. Robot arms could wash hulls, inspect propellers with cameras or apply antifouling paint while the boat sits in its rack, although we found no marina doing this yet. Cells like that are usually designed and tested in RobotStudio before anyone bolts a robot to a rack.

A cabin cruiser resting in its rack at a dry storage marina, 2015. Photo: IketaniDaisei / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Safety and staff will set the pace. A crane carrying a 30,000 pound boat high above people needs strict zones and backup systems, and Florida barns have to keep working after storms and power cuts. Forklift drivers at a busy barn such as Marina Bay Harbor in Texas, which moves 245 boats, are experienced specialists. An automated barn swaps some of those jobs for technicians who can keep the crane and its sensors running. If you want the factory side of moving heavy loads, our ABB robot use cases overview is a good place to start.

An ABB robot working on a long wooden part clamped in a fixture. Photo: ABB

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