Sixty kilometres from downtown Tianjin, cranes towering over a ship at the largest port in Northern China offload containers onto an electric vehicle that brings the goods to land. It is an all-too-familiar process to any dockworker, except this particular terminal has no workers on the ground at all.
The automated terminal, which went into operation in October 2021, is one of the latest efforts from Huawei Technologies Co. The project, a collaboration with the Port of Tianjin and other partners, uses autonomous driving, 5G, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT) to create more automated, greener operations, according to Huawei.
The reason no humans are allowed in the automated area of the terminal is that they are the most unpredictable factor for such systems. When the automated system encounters a situation it cannot handle, the problem is sent to a control centre, where employees control the system remotely.
