WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

1
00:00:00.230 --> 00:00:02.840
I've talked about containerization
on this channel before,

2
00:00:02.840 --> 00:00:05.620
but this video is different
because it includes the phrase

3
00:00:05.620 --> 00:00:08.470
"hundred-tonne autonomous robots".

4
00:00:08.470 --> 00:00:12.100
New Zealand is a long way from almost
everywhere else on the planet.

5
00:00:12.100 --> 00:00:14.960
Humans only reached here
about 700 years ago.

6
00:00:14.960 --> 00:00:16.510
If you look at a globe of the earth,

7
00:00:16.510 --> 00:00:19.442
in almost every direction
for thousands of miles

8
00:00:19.442 --> 00:00:21.440
there's nothing but ocean.

9
00:00:21.440 --> 00:00:23.780
Which means that the
Ports of Auckland here

10
00:00:23.780 --> 00:00:25.731
and the other ports like it
all around the country

11
00:00:25.731 --> 00:00:29.320
are vital to keeping New Zealand running.

12
00:00:29.320 --> 00:00:30.660
- Well the fantastic thing about the
Ports of Auckland

13
00:00:30.660 --> 00:00:32.860
is that we're right
in the middle of the city,

14
00:00:32.860 --> 00:00:36.780
but the downside of that
is that we're quite constrained.

15
00:00:36.780 --> 00:00:41.130
We're not in the sixties when you could just
pave over everything and build out into the harbour.

16
00:00:41.130 --> 00:00:44.170
We can't expand anymore,
so we've got a fixed footprint,

17
00:00:44.170 --> 00:00:47.360
not so great when your city's growing
at a massive rate of knots.

18
00:00:47.360 --> 00:00:50.190
When your get your head around the fact
that you can't do the old fashioned things

19
00:00:50.190 --> 00:00:52.170
like just keep reclaiming land,

20
00:00:52.170 --> 00:00:54.140
it becomes quite an exciting challenge.

21
00:00:54.140 --> 00:00:57.010
How do we put the maximum
number of containers

22
00:00:57.010 --> 00:00:58.440
through this little plot of land?

23
00:00:58.440 --> 00:00:59.930
- Like every other
major port in the world,

24
00:00:59.930 --> 00:01:02.120
almost all the goods that arrive
or leave here

25
00:01:02.120 --> 00:01:04.740
are going to be in a
standardised shipping container.

26
00:01:04.740 --> 00:01:08.840
For incoming goods, once a container has 
been unlocked from the ship,

27
00:01:08.840 --> 00:01:13.230
these giant quay cranes take it
and move it down to ground level.

28
00:01:13.230 --> 00:01:16.240
And then it's moved to a holding area
by a straddle carrier,

29
00:01:16.240 --> 00:01:20.800
ready for a truck or a train to take it
on the last miles of its journey.

30
00:01:20.800 --> 00:01:23.190
Those straddle carriers
look like something

31
00:01:23.190 --> 00:01:25.930
out of an old Gerry Anderson show,
but they're real.

32
00:01:25.930 --> 00:01:28.920
They weigh 70 tonnes before they even
pick up a container

33
00:01:28.920 --> 00:01:30.640
and the newest straddle carriers

34
00:01:30.650 --> 00:01:32.952
which are being tested
right here, right now,

35
00:01:32.952 --> 00:01:34.300
are automated.

36
00:01:34.300 --> 00:01:37.410
Fully loaded, that is a hundred-tonne robot

37
00:01:37.410 --> 00:01:39.940
just moving around at speed.

38
00:01:39.940 --> 00:01:43.160
- We are automating while still operating
the terminal,

39
00:01:43.160 --> 00:01:44.680
it's an absolutely crazy thing to do

40
00:01:44.680 --> 00:01:47.310
but we have to do it because
of our space limitations.

41
00:01:47.310 --> 00:01:49.980
So it's a bit like, you're
having open heart surgery

42
00:01:49.980 --> 00:01:51.310
while you're still playing tennis.

43
00:01:51.310 --> 00:01:56.020
So we're now getting robots which can
work much more steadily and stack higher

44
00:01:56.020 --> 00:01:57.800
and stack closer together.

45
00:01:57.800 --> 00:02:02.040
And so we can get a lot more capacity
out of our same piece of land.

46
00:02:02.040 --> 00:02:03.240
- It's really really precise.

47
00:02:03.240 --> 00:02:04.970
The A-STRADs can stack containers

48
00:02:04.970 --> 00:02:07.710
with an accuracy of a
couple of centimetres.

49
00:02:07.710 --> 00:02:11.060
That actually can pose a problem because
the wear and tear on the pavement

50
00:02:11.060 --> 00:02:12.810
is always in the same place
at the same time.

51
00:02:12.810 --> 00:02:14.770
So we've got a fairly
cool solution to that,

52
00:02:14.770 --> 00:02:16.290
which is called stack shuffling.

53
00:02:16.290 --> 00:02:19.660
So in a manned terminal, of course for the
straddle operators to know where

54
00:02:19.660 --> 00:02:21.660
to put the containers, we
paint lines on the ground.

55
00:02:21.660 --> 00:02:24.040
Over a number of years that
wears out the pavement.

56
00:02:24.040 --> 00:02:26.751
We get ruts where the
straddles drive repetitively

57
00:02:26.751 --> 00:02:30.780
and damage on the asphalt where the
container corners land all the time.

58
00:02:30.780 --> 00:02:34.193
And of course that then requires repair,
which is disruptive and expensive.

59
00:02:34.200 --> 00:02:38.400
So with A-STRADS they
refer of course to an electronic map,

60
00:02:38.400 --> 00:02:40.339
they need
no lines on the ground.

61
00:02:40.339 --> 00:02:44.950
So that enables us to then move the
container stacks just a little bit

62
00:02:44.950 --> 00:02:46.999
and that spreads the wear
and tear on the pavement

63
00:02:46.999 --> 00:02:49.040
over a much longer period of time.

64
00:02:49.040 --> 00:02:51.200
- GPS isn't quite precise
enough for this job,

65
00:02:51.200 --> 00:02:55.150
and there's a lot of flat steel surfaces
that could reflect or block those signals.

66
00:02:55.150 --> 00:02:58.490
So there's a local positioning system
installed here as well.

67
00:02:58.490 --> 00:03:00.711
Synchronised transmitters
all around the port

68
00:03:00.711 --> 00:03:03.260
work like miniature GPS satellites.

69
00:03:03.260 --> 00:03:06.820
And equipment on each straddle carrier
triangulates the location

70
00:03:06.820 --> 00:03:09.250
using the light speed delay from each one.

71
00:03:09.250 --> 00:03:12.270
Which is literally
sub-nanosecond precision.

72
00:03:12.270 --> 00:03:14.310
They don't just look at
the timing signal itself,

73
00:03:14.310 --> 00:03:17.810
they track the phase of each transmitter's
carrier signal.

74
00:03:17.810 --> 00:03:22.410
- The Locata system is our system for the
positioning of the machines.

75
00:03:22.410 --> 00:03:27.600
We have these two antennas on top of
each machine in order to also be aware

76
00:03:27.600 --> 00:03:30.710
of the orientation of the
machine at each moment.

77
00:03:30.710 --> 00:03:31.960
But it's a local system.

78
00:03:31.960 --> 00:03:36.030
Everything which is directly related
to the main safety of the straddle carrier

79
00:03:36.030 --> 00:03:37.150
is on the straddle carrier.

80
00:03:37.150 --> 00:03:40.560
Also the navigation itself happens
on the straddle carrier.

81
00:03:40.560 --> 00:03:43.040
- Whilst we're automating a large part
of our operation,

82
00:03:43.040 --> 00:03:45.340
we're actually keeping
people in a part of it.

83
00:03:45.340 --> 00:03:47.210
So we'll actually have
interactions between

84
00:03:47.210 --> 00:03:50.810
manned straddle carriers and automated
straddle carriers, and that's never been done

85
00:03:50.810 --> 00:03:52.840
in this way
anywhere else in the world before.

86
00:03:52.840 --> 00:03:54.720
The system has multiple layers of safety.

87
00:03:54.720 --> 00:03:58.370
The first one is the simplest, which is
we put a big fence around the terminal

88
00:03:58.370 --> 00:03:59.203
to keep people out.

89
00:03:59.203 --> 00:04:01.140
Beyond that, then, we've
got a computer system

90
00:04:01.140 --> 00:04:03.410
that monitors where all the
machines are all the time

91
00:04:03.410 --> 00:04:05.800
so it's both manned and
the automated straddles.

92
00:04:05.800 --> 00:04:08.200
It manages the interactions between
those machines,

93
00:04:08.200 --> 00:04:10.060
and it's a
standalone fail-safe system.

94
00:04:10.072 --> 00:04:12.780
And then as sort of last layer of defence,

95
00:04:12.780 --> 00:04:15.610
the A-STRADs have laser scanners on them

96
00:04:15.610 --> 00:04:17.710
which will detect the
presence of an obstacle

97
00:04:17.710 --> 00:04:20.040
in front of the machine and stop it
before there's a collision.

98
00:04:20.040 --> 00:04:22.450
- We've got a different
type of automation here.

99
00:04:22.450 --> 00:04:26.696
We have straddle carriers that are only
automated in part of the terminal.

100
00:04:26.696 --> 00:04:30.620
And the reason we've done that
is again the throughput.

101
00:04:30.620 --> 00:04:32.660
So our crane drivers are really fast,

102
00:04:32.660 --> 00:04:35.280
under the crane we've got lots and lots
of steel,

103
00:04:35.280 --> 00:04:38.260
it's really hard to get
those signals and automate.

104
00:04:38.260 --> 00:04:41.932
So by keeping manual operations
underneath these cranes here,

105
00:04:41.932 --> 00:04:45.465
and then automating the
yard, we get more capacity.

106
00:04:45.465 --> 00:04:49.460
The robots do the really boring stuff
like moving containers around,

107
00:04:49.460 --> 00:04:51.160
digging out the bottom one
to put it on a truck,

108
00:04:51.160 --> 00:04:53.151
and the people do the really tricky stuff.

109
00:04:53.160 --> 00:04:55.900
You know, the technology will no doubt
improve,

110
00:04:55.900 --> 00:05:01.680
but for now, that mixture of people
and robots is the perfect mix.

111
00:05:01.680 --> 00:05:03.300
- Thank you to all the team
at the Ports of Auckland.

112
00:05:03.300 --> 00:05:05.900
Pull down the description for more
about them, and their work.