On an overcast spring morning in the port of Caofeidian in northeastern China, a vast ship-to-shore crane whisks a fully-laden shipping container through the air and onto an idling truck. Though there’s a human sitting inside, a careful observer would spot that the truck is calling all the shots.
That’s because the vehicle is one of a fleet of five autonomous trucks that a Chinese startup called TuSimple is using to ferry containers around the terminal. A few other ports use trucks that follow paths marked by magnets or sensors embedded in the ground but Caofeidaian is the first to use vehicles that can navigate a port by themselves. It’s like moving from trams to cars.
The goal of the pilot project is to demonstrate the ability of autonomous vehicles to perform the role of a so-called “terminal tractor,” bearing containers from the shore to the cargo yard.
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“At this stage, we want to achieve high-level reliability and consistency of autonomous terminal tractors rather than moving lots of containers,” says TuSimple’s Bruce Ouyang.
By the end of the year Ouyang wants to replace all the human-piloted terminal trucks deployed at Caofeidian with 20 self-driving models. The cranes loading the containers will be autonomous too, with a central system coordinating the movements of both the cranes and trucks. In total, they will have to process 300,000 standard-sized containers per year to match the current throughput of the port.
Expensive business
Self-driving container handlers have been used in a few large ports, such as Yangshan near Shanghai and Rotterdam, for years but have yet to really take off elsewhere. This is because upgrading can be very expensive.
Each vehicle can cost $700,000 apiece, and sometimes special beacons or guiding strips must be installed at the port, meaning it can be shut down for weeks. In comparison, TuSimple say they can modify a standard $50,000 truck with an additional $20,000 worth of cameras, radar, GPS, and computer processors, and it’s then ready to go.
Ouyang says TuSimple is in talks with 10 different ports in China, and expects to announce its first terminal tractor sale in the second half of the year.
Labour costs typically amount to 75 per cent of the costs of long-haul trucking freight, so the economic pressure on port operators to automate is significant, says Qiang Hong, of the Center for Automotive Research.
Other ports in Singapore and Europe are also experimenting with automated trucks, though the Caofeidian pilot is the first to use them as a fleet of terminal tractors.
Ports are an “ideal environment” for self-driving trucks because the navigation conditions are relatively simple as pedestrians and other vehicles are barred, says at the University of California, Berkeley.
Container handling is also better suited to machines, as they are safer and more accurate that humans, he says. “If you use automation, the position of the truck in relation to the crane and containers can be measured more accurately,” Lu says.
