No Drivers, No Cabs: How a Robot Port Actually Unloads a 24,000-TEU Ship

On a quay in Rotterdam, a ship almost 400 metres long is being emptied by eight cranes with nobody inside them, while driverless vehicles glide across the concrete below. The biggest container ships afloat carry 24,346 boxes. So what actually makes a robot port work, and is it really faster than a human one? In this film we open Maasvlakte II, the automated container terminal built on land reclaimed from the North Sea. We follow one box from the ship to the stack: the cabless ship-to-shore cranes, the 73 battery-powered driverless vehicles, the rail-mounted stacking cranes and the terminal operating system that decides every move before it happens. Then the surprise: independent research says automated terminals are not faster than manned ones. Their real product is predictability. We also look at the stowage plan, where every box has a three-number address, at Yangshan in Shanghai, the largest automated port on Earth, and at the people who did not disappear, only moved from the quay into a quiet room. Chapters 0:00 A quay with nobody inside 1:05 The 24,346-box ship 3:10 Maasvlakte II, built on the sea 5:07 The driverless vehicles 7:06 Are robots really faster? 9:02 The brain: the terminal operating system 10:24 Every box has an address 12:10 Yangshan, the biggest of all 13:32 What the robots cost 14:52 Back to the quay Figures and sources Maasvlakte II terminal (86 hectares at opening, 1,000 m quay, 20 m depth, 2.7 million TEU capacity, 8 cabless ship-to-shore cranes, 26 automated stacking cranes at opening, 73 driverless lift AGVs with batteries of about 8 hours, Madison Maersk and Maersk Lanco call data): APM Terminals, our-terminal pages and press releases, 2017 - https://www.apmterminals.com Construction cost (about 542 million USD), Navis terminal operating system, first ship in December 2014: SWZ Maritime - https://www.swzmaritime.nl MSC Irina (24,346 TEU, 399.9 x 61.3 m, delivered March 2023), first container voyage of Ideal X in 1956, Yangshan port (36.54 million TEU in 2015), Donghai Bridge (32.5 km): Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSC_Irina Automation and productivity ("reduced rather than improved productivity"): ECTRI / CENIT research group summary, 1 September 2023. Qingdao record of 52.1 crane moves per hour in 2021: China Daily, 2021. Employers' group study (PMA, West Coast) on automated terminals, as reported by Bloomberg; its method is disputed: https://www.wealthmanagement.com RWG terminal staffing (10 to 15 people per shift, mostly IT specialists): Dredging Today. Comparisons and the wind limit are explained in the film as approximate; the exact crane wind limit depends on the crane. Footage: Pexels. Some cutaway and interior views are illustrations. Music: YouTube Audio Library - Glacier (Chris Haugen), Pure Potentiality (Benjamin Martins), Cold Blue (Astron), Beyond (Patrick Patrikios), Final Soliloquy (Asher Fulero).