Home/Industries/Yards, Ports & Fleet
IndustryOutdoors, and GPS is still not good enough.
Between stacked containers and under gantries, satellite positioning degrades exactly where slot-level accuracy is needed most.
What is actually hard here.
A yard looks like an outdoor problem and behaves like an indoor one. Steel stacks three high block the sky, and the signals that do arrive have bounced. GNSS accuracy of several metres is fine for a road and useless for choosing between adjacent slots.
The practical consequence is a yard inventory that drifts. A container is recorded in a slot it left two days ago, and reconciling it means a person walking the rows.
What it looks like on site.
The outputs worth having.
- Slot-level position for containers, trailers and swap bodies.
- Vehicle position and route for reach stackers, terminal tractors and shunters.
- Gate-to-slot dwell — how long between arriving and being put away.
- Idle asset detection — trailers that have not moved and are quietly costing money.
- Gate events — identity, direction and time, from RFID rather than from a clipboard.
- Reefer and high-value dwell — how long a unit that costs money to hold has been standing, and where.
Why these, and not the others.
UWB because slot resolution is the requirement, and no satellite system delivers it between stacks. Anchors mount on light masts and gantries that already exist and already have power.
RFID at the gates, where traffic is funnelled and identity is what matters. Gate reads and yard positions joined together give a complete movement history.
A sensible order of work.
- Establish the coordinate frameThe yard's own slot grid, not a general-purpose map. Everything downstream refers to it.
- Anchors on existing structureMasts, gantries and building corners. Outdoor-rated, surveyed, with the geometry checked against the stack plan.
- Gate portalsRFID plus, where wanted, plate recognition. Direction from read order.
- Tag the movers firstHandling equipment before containers — fewer tags, faster payback.
- Reconcile continuouslyYard inventory that updates itself rather than being audited.
If it works.
- Yard inventory stops drifting between audits.
- Slot selection is checked at the moment of placement, not discovered later.
- Idle equipment becomes visible as a number rather than a suspicion.
Does this look like your site?
Tell us the space, what moves in it, and the decision a position would change. We will tell you which technology fits and what a first deployment would involve.