Guiding Autonomous Trucks to Operate in the Toughest Terminal Environments
Container terminals are among the most challenging industrial environments for perception systems. Heavy trucks, trailers, reach stackers, cranes, and workers operate in tight, continuously changing spaces filled with large metal structures. For radar sensing, it is like switching on a laser pointer inside a hall of mirrors. Reflections, interference, and clutter make reliable detection extremely difficult. CES worked with FERNRIDE to enable reliable radar-based environmental sensing on autonomous terminal trucks operating in demanding terminal environments. This is a key enabler for safe, autonomous navigation.
”In our collaboration with CES, optimizing radar performance in complex container terminal environments has been a key focus. Container terminals present unique challenges, including large metal structures, stacked containers, cranes, and the constant movement of heavy equipment, all of which cause complex reflections and potential false detections. By applying advanced signal processing techniques, we improved the radar system’s ability to reliably detect and track relevant objects. This optimization is essential for the safe and precise operation of FERNRIDE’s autonomous trucks.”, said Stan Hristov, Principal Engineer at FERNRIDE.
CES supported FERNRIDE through the following key contributions:
Radar Sensor Selection & Setup for Maximum Safety
Reliable awareness starts with precise sensor engineering: placement, tuning, and calibration built for terminal conditions. We carefully identified the most suitable radar and designed its mounting position and orientation based on the specific terminal environment, vehicle architecture, and operational needs. By considering factors such as blind spot coverage, sensing accuracy and resolution, overlapping field of views, radar interference, and environmental reflectivity, we are engineering an advanced radar system for reliable detection in the most challenging terminal environments.
The ARS430 Long Range Radar proved to be the ideal choice, ensuring that all safety-critical areas and targets are monitored and detected—whether it is a pedestrian, an unloading reach stacker, or a blind corner—while maintaining a balance between performance and installation constraints.
- Real-World Data Collection and Analysis via Data Acquisition Kit
Each environment is unique, and so are its challenges. That’s why we invested early in detailed measurement campaigns at the customer site in Tallinn, Estonia, collecting radar data where it matters: in real operating conditions on live terminals, creating edge scenarios to be prepared for the unexpected. By analyzing this data, we identified critical traffic patterns, object types, environmental influences, and risky scenarios specific to the container terminal environment and we built a highly targeted solution while accelerating project timelines. To support agile development and adaptation, CES provided FERNRIDE with a raw sensor data acquisition kit that enabled recording radar data independently and capturing critical, exceptional, spontaneous scenarios arising during a busy day at the harbour—without losing valuable time and resources. This approach supports faster system refinement, development and validation on our side while offering FERNRIDE transparency and flexibility.
- Smart and Adaptive Algorithms for Complex Port Operations
Terminal environments demand more than conventional perception systems. Highly dynamic actor interactions, actors with unique structures and shapes, a constantly changing environment with containers and railways, actors suddenly appearing behind containers, busy traffic during the unloading or loading of container ships, and adverse, yet common for terminals, weather conditions such as rain, fog or snow create unique challenges that cannot be addressed with off-the-shelf solutions. CES provides a continuously tracked dynamic target list to anticipate safety hazards and prevent incidents while increasing efficiency during autonomous operation in the yard terminal. Our algorithms are specifically developed to handle these complexities, including:
- Robust multi-object tracking for closely spaced actors regardless of their velocity, distance, shape.
- Classification of mixed traffic participants, from pedestrians to reach stackers or cranes.
- Intelligent handling of occlusions and conversion of radar noise caused by the metal-rich harbour environment into a usable advantage.
Our modular, customizable algorithms allow quick adjustments to match evolving operations or regulatory demands while perception remains reliable and effective.
Close Collaboration as a Key to Success
At CES we enjoy tackling challenging engineering problems and believe success is inevitable when disciplines meet, ideas are exchanged, and perspectives are shared on top of hard work. We approach every collaboration with the professionalism it demands—but also with the amateur spirit of curiosity, enthusiasm. Therefore, from the initial idea to operational deployment, we worked closely with FERNRIDE through open discussions understanding the capabilities, limitations, visualizing the final system and beyond to ensure that our solutions are fully aligned with their operational goals.
We are also deeply grateful for the opportunity to meet new colleagues, people, and to discover different parts of the world—thanks to our radar technology, engineering solutions, and the trust of FERNRIDE.
“Our teamwork and extensive experience in radar technology—spanning both automotive and non-automotive applications—have been instrumental in tackling real-world challenges. This experience, combined with our state-of-art radar sensors has allowed us to develop effective and reliable solutions for autonomous navigation in dynamic terminal environments.”, Cagatay Erbatur, Radar Perception Specialist
FERNRIDE became the first to achieve TÜV safety certification for an autonomous terminal truck system, with CES radar sensing as a key contributing part of the certified solution.
We are happy to have supported their achievement, ensuring the radar perception layer met the rigorous safety standards required for certification. However, this is just the beginning. Both our collaboration and development of our radars & engineering services will keep evolving towards a safer and automated future.
