ABB Goes After the Quay Crane — The Last Manual Bottleneck in Container Terminals

For more than a decade, container terminals have automated almost everything except the part of the operation that sits directly over the ship. This week, ABB launched Waterside Automation — a vision and motion-sensor platform with AI and real-time analytics — that automates ship-to-shore (STS) quay crane operations over the vessel itself, the most technically challenging part of the container-handling cycle. What the system does: The platform uses vision-based and motion sensors to monitor container position, crane movement and the vessel environment in real time. Based on this data, the system automatically executes lifting and positioning tasks, adapting to vessel movement alongside and across the quay and to weather disruptions. It integrates exception handling, stowage confirmation, optical character recognition (OCR) and digital work instructions into a single workflow — reducing the manual verification steps that currently sit between every container move. ABB has adapted and validated capabilities developed in semi-autonomous urban transport for the specific operational reality of container terminals. The bigger structural change — quay crane pooling: The most consequential feature is not the automation itself but the decoupling of operators from individual cranes. Today, each quay crane requires a dedicated operator. Under the ABB model, operators supervise multiple cranes remotely from an office-based environment — intervening when exceptions arise rather than directly controlling every lift. This quay crane pooling turns operator headcount from a per-crane cost into a workforce-flexibility variable, and it changes the economics of terminal labour planning. Why this matters for ship managers: Quay crane productivity is the single biggest determinant of berth time. Waiting at anchor and slow turnaround at the quay are still the largest controllable cost drivers in container voyage economics — and they are largely determined by what happens during the ship-to-shore handling window. If terminals begin deploying Waterside Automation at scale, expect more consistent crane cycle times, less variance between shifts, and fewer weather-related stoppages. Ship managers calling at automated terminals should ask their commercial teams to track whether the operator's published berth productivity figures begin to tighten in 2026–2027. Terminals that adopt early will also have a stronger position in the next round of liner contract negotiations. ABB has a long history in port electrification and crane systems, so this is not a cold-start product — it is an extension of an existing terminal-equipment business into AI-assisted operations. [Marine Link · Container News · Port Technology]

This story is part of the Maritime AI Digest of 24 May 2026.

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