Abstract
Automated container terminals have been developed over the world years and many countries are interested in them because the amount of containers exported or imported is rapidly increasing. The conventional container terminals were not designed to handle this kind of heavily many containers. They would face many structural problems soon or later, although they have been managed to do well so far. One of the most important things in automated container terminal is the handing equipments able to transfer many containers efficiently. Those are maybe automated transfer cranes, automatic guided vehicles and automated quay-side cranes. The word 'automated' means the equipment is operated without drivers and those equipments are able to work without any interruption in working schedule. Through the researches on the conventional transfer cranes, we decided that the structure of conventional transfer cranes is not proper in automated container terminal and it is not possible to handle so many container in limited time. Therefore we have been studying on the proper structure of the automated container for past several years and a new type of transfer cranes has been developed. Design concept and control method of the new crane are introduced and experimental results are presented in this paper.his paper.
