The overseas port of the northern German city of Rostock handles up to 30 million tons of goods per year in addition to numerous passengers. Rostock Port GmbH has opted for a project-specific prototype development from the BERNARD Gruppe to organise the associated logistical effort of continuously moving truck trailers.
The scope of the project is a complete solution aimed at providing real-time localisation and identification data. The latter are based on the detection of truck and trailer license plates and, when viewed in perspective, on the International Loading Unit Code (ILU code) attached to the container.
The implementation is based on a combined solution: At predefined passage points, several in-house developed BERNARD Character Analysers (BCAs) detect characteristics from a great distance. The slightly adapted version of the product thus finds new areas of application in addition to the existing applications, such as the survey of origin, destination and through traffic. In the future, economic and technical aspects of scalability across the entire port area can be realised using fully autonomous drone flights based on local requirements. Without a dedicated pilot, the flying objects leave their charging station and take pictures along predefined flight routes and at predefined viewing angles. These are processed fully automatically with low latency and transmitted to the client together with location coordinates and other metadata. Manual test flights have been documented and are setting the direction for the completion of the project.
Parallel to the prototype development, the BERNARD Gruppe was approached during the project period for specific follow-up projects, including the tracking of trailers as they leave the port area and in their further course.
Felix Zust, BERNARD Gruppe
