If you visit the docks of Auckland, New Zealand, you’ll discover an automated world in which self-driving robots maintain the order of hundreds of giant shipping containers awaiting their next destination.

Containerised cargo has had a massive impact on trade and shipping, and now self-driving cranes have taken it to the next level.

The ability to load and rapidly unload ships laden with containers of standardised sizes, and then plonk those boxes down onto a truck chassis or railcar carrier for land transportation, has changed the world.

It’s the reason that you can order something random from China and have it delivered to your doorstep in South Africa, reports Hackaday:

…boxes take up a lot of space on the ground, and the yards used for sorting them tend to be enormous. Luckily, containers stack nicely, and so port managers can achieve some space savings by piling the containers up. This requires special vehicles called straddle carriers — basically mobile cranes that can straddle a stack of containers and that are tall enough to hoist a container up over the top of the stack and carry it away.

Traditionally, straddle carriers were operated by a human driver. But increasingly, straddle carriers are being converted into autonomous vehicles – like the 27 Konecrane units being used at the Ports of Auckland in New Zealand – to increase the port’s capacity.

To see the Konecranes in action, skip ahead to 40 seconds in:

The straddle carriers use a local positioning system based on time-of-flight from a series of transmitters, located on poles around the yard, to find their targets.

The container terminal environment is an ideal test bed for self-driving vehicles. The environment is highly controlled, and the exact location of each vehicle within the system, manned or unmanned, is known. The lighting is controlled and even, the pavement is flat and smooth, and the task, while enormous, is well-defined and fairly simple.

For a quick breakdown of how containers are loaded, watch this:

While all of this is quite interesting to read about, in practice, the shipping game is not something you’d want to handle alone.

Moving cargo from origin to destinations means confronting things like route optimisation, currency cover, tariff determination, customs regulations, packaging requirements, marine insurance… who needs this, right?

Berry & Donaldson, one of South Africa’s largest privately owned logistics companies, has been helping importers and exporters navigate the labyrinth that is international freighting for over half a century.

They keep it simple, taking the hassle and worry away from you so you can focus on running your business.

Think of them as your own logistics department, and then forget about all that hassle.

[source:hackaday]