RTG Crane Telemetry

Overview

RTG Crane Telemetry turns a fleet of Rubber-Tyred Gantry cranes into a live, queryable data stream. We tap into the J1939 CAN bus and PLC of each RTG, surface spreader load, hoist / gantry / trolley speeds, fuel burn and container moves per hour, and push the data through an on-crane edge gateway to a fleet dashboard your yard planners and maintenance team actually use.

Designed for container terminals where every minute of crane downtime costs money. Sensors are already on the crane — we make them visible, comparable across the fleet, and tied to work orders.

Per-move telemetry — load, cycle time, route, operator, container ID
Predictive maintenance — hoist current, vibration, fuel trends flag failures days early
Fleet benchmarking — moves/hr per RTG, per shift, per operator
TOS integration — push moves to Navis N4, CATOS, OPUS or any TOS via webhook

How It Works

On-crane sensors — load cell on spreader, encoders on hoist / gantry / trolley drums, J1939 read from engine ECU, GPS on cab.
Edge gateway — ruggedised industrial PC bolted in the crane cab, reads CAN at 250 kbps, buffers when LTE is down, applies edge rules (e.g. IF hoist current > 110% rated for 30s → alarm).
Cloud ingest — MQTT over TLS 1.3 to a multi-tenant time-series backend (TimescaleDB / InfluxDB), retained 5 years.
Dashboard & APIs — fleet view, RTG drill-down, replay-by-move, CSV export, REST and MQTT egress for your BI stack.

Features

Move-level capture — every container lift logged with weight, source bay, dest bay, cycle time, operator
Hoist health — current, brake torque, rope wear trend, gear-box temperature
Fuel & emissions — litres/hr, idle time, CO₂ equivalents — supports ESG reporting
Operator scorecards — moves/hr, cycle consistency, fuel efficiency by operator ID
Geofencing — GPS-defined no-go zones (rail crossings, fuel bay)
Anti-collision feeds — RTG-to-RTG proximity alerts
OTA firmware — push new edge rules to the whole fleet in batches with rollback
5-year history — replay any move, any RTG, any day for incident investigation

Use Cases

Container terminals — fleet-wide moves/hr benchmarking and operator coaching
Predictive maintenance — catch hoist motor wear before line-stopping failure
Fuel-burn reduction — identify idle-heavy RTGs and operators, target retrofits
ESG & emissions reporting — port-level CO₂ numbers for sustainability disclosures
Insurance & incident replay — second-by-second replay of every container move
Productivity bonus schemes — auditable, per-operator moves data for shift pay

Specifications

CAN interfaces: J1939, CANopen, custom OEM dialects (Konecranes, Kalmar, Liebherr, ZPMC)
Sensors: Load cell 0–80 t ±0.5%, hoist encoder 4096 ppr, GPS 2.5 m CEP
Edge gateway: ARM quad-core, 4 GB RAM, 32 GB SSD, 12–36 VDC, IP65, −30 to +70°C
Connectivity: 4G LTE primary, Wi-Fi terminal failback, Ethernet to TOS
Telemetry rate: 1 Hz default, 100 Hz burst on event, edge buffer 7 days
Security: Mutual TLS, certificate-based device identity, signed firmware
Integrations: Navis N4, OPUS, CATOS, SAP PM, IBM Maximo, Power BI, Grafana