Development of a Remote Operation System for a Quay Crane Simulator

Abstract

Quay cranes are considered core equipment for container terminal operation. However, unmanned operation systems have not as yet been announced due to the technological difficulties of implementation. In this paper, we developed a wireless controller to control a quay crane simulator remotely and conducted its performance test, a first step toward unmanned operation of quay cranes. The communication delay of a developed wireless controller was about 9.4ms on average while that of existing wired controllers was about 5.6ms. The same functions were implemented and tested on a smart phone where the average communication delay was 7.3ms. In addition, to apply the developed system into a real environment, we proposed a network architecture based on IEEE 802.11ac and carried out its performance evaluation. When the distance between two nodes was 50m apart, the throughputs of the TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and UDP (User Datagram Protocol) were 57Mbps and 189Mbps, respectively. The communication delay of the control data was 9.1ms through the TCP channel. These results reveal the proper working of remote quay crane operation if we adopt the IEEE 802.11ac network.