A big eye and boxes
The Rivergate system identifies containers on inland vessels. Digitalisation has reached new levels in inland shipping too. Duisport has teamed up with its technology partners to equip cranes with cameras that work together to automate the handling of cargo at the terminal and make it less error-prone.
Duisport has taken its next digitalisation step. The use of ‘optical character recognition’ (OCR) access points has already been implemented for the railways and road haulage, in the inalnd port of Duisburg; now the hub has a new solution for waterborne traffic too.
Together with Duisport’s technology partner Vitronic, a company that specialises in industrial image processing, the inland port developed the new Rivergate system in 15 months, on the basis of high-resolution 12K cameras.
The system will be deployed on this pilot project and beyond, initially on two cranes. One is located in the Duisburg Trimodal Terminal (D3T) at Logport I in Duisburg Rheinhausen, and one on a crane at the GWW terminal at Logport II in the Duisburg Hochfeld area.
This pilot project has made it possible to digitally record the ID of containers and compare them to the loading list in a matter of seconds and with a recognition rate of almost 100% when loading or unloading an inland vessel.
The system can thus prevent incorrect loading, which is important, because in cases of a so-called mis-pick the spreader can no longer be unlocked. At the same time, the system can check whether the customs seal is intact, or even whether there is any damage to the container – even at night and in bad weather.
Special algorithms are all a-whirl in the background – that’s progress today.