A Busan Terminal Teaches Its Cranes to Watch for People on Foot

At Busan New Container Terminal in South Korea, the software company CyberLogitec has installed a system that warns the drivers of yard machines when a worker on foot is close to them.

The problem is old and deadly. The cargo-handling safety body ICHCA ranks people struck by vehicles as the second biggest cause of death in cargo handling. In August, three industry bodies together asked terminals to do more about it.

How it works. There are 28 AI cameras on 14 quay cranes, looking down at the yard. They pick out people on foot and work out where each one is standing. About 70 yard machines carry precise satellite positioning. The system puts people and machines on the same live map and measures the distance between them. The driver gets a warning on a screen in the cab at 15, 10 and 5 metres, with a bar showing the direction.

Three choices here deserve credit. First, workers carry no tag. Most systems only protect people who remembered to wear the device. Second, the system finds a person but does not identify who it is, so it is a safety tool and not a tracking tool. Third, it only warns when the machine and the person are in the same lane. That last one matters most. As CyberLogitec's Dr Junhee Cho puts it: "The measure of a safety system is not how much it catches, but whether people keep trusting it." A driver who hears ten false alarms a shift stops listening by the third.

What is missing. There is no number for accidents or near misses, before or after. The accuracy figures, under 3 cm for machines and under 20 cm for people, come from "field validation", and the announcement does not say who did that validation. We do not know how long it has been running.

Why a ship manager should care. Your crew and your lashing gangs walk in that yard. And the design lesson travels well: any alarm on a bridge or in an engine room has to be believed to be worth anything. Ask your suppliers how many false alarms their system gives per watch. Few can answer. [Port Technology]

This story is part of the Maritime AI Digest of 11 October 2026.

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