Automated Mooring: From Deckhands to ABB Robots

Every ship that comes alongside has to be tied up, and on most quays that still means heavy ropes, winches and crew standing where a parting line can hurt them. Automated mooring replaces the ropes with vacuum pads or hooks on the quay that hold the hull at the press of a button. This post covers how ships were moored by hand, how vacuum pads reached ports and canal locks, what this autumn's storms and India's first system show about the technology now, and a job ABB robots already do at a ferry berth: plugging battery ferries into shore power while they are tied up.

The battery ferry Tycho Brahe off Helsingborg in May 2023, on the route where ABB robots plug the ferries into shore power. Photo: Thomas Dahlstrøm Nielsen / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How ships were tied up by hand, and the first machines that helped

Mooring needs people on the ship and people on the pier working together. A sailor throws a light, weighted heaving line ashore, the shore team uses it to haul the heavy mooring line across, drops its eye over a bollard, and the ship's winches or capstans pull it tight. The heaviest cargo ships may need more than a dozen lines and small vessels four to six, usually made of manila or nylon rope. On Hong Kong's Star Ferry the crew still catch the ropes with a billhook. Nylon stretches, and if a heavily loaded line breaks it can snap back hard enough to kill a bystander.

A US Navy seaman throws a heaving line to sailors on the pier while mooring USS George Washington in Yokosuka, Japan, in 2009. Photo: U.S. Navy via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

At the Panama Canal, machines took over much of the line work from the start. The locks opened in 1914, and ships are guided through them by electric locomotives called mules. Each mule runs on a track beside the chamber and uses its own winch to take in or pay out cable, keeping the ship centred, while the ship's engines push it forward. A large ship gets eight mules, two on each side at the bow and two at the stern. On ordinary quays, quick release mooring hooks cut down how much heavy rope shore staff have to handle, and with it the risk of back injuries.

A Panama Canal mule, one of the electric locomotives that hold ships on cables as they pass through the locks. Photo: Stan Shebs / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Vacuum mooring arrived in the 2000s. The Swedish company Cavotec partnered with Mooring Systems Ltd in 2004, and in 2005 the first MoorMaster 400 was sold to the Port of Salalah in Oman, which ordered four MoorMaster 600 units for its container port the following year. In 2011 Port Hedland in Western Australia ordered 24 units. By August 2015 the St. Lawrence Seaway, open since 1959, had hands-free mooring at five of its 15 locks and planned to cover all of them by 2018. Each lock gets six suction packs on hydraulic arms that rise and fall with the ship, each holding up to 20 tons, which saves about seven minutes per lock on a two-way transit.

A MoorMaster vacuum mooring unit pressed against a Wightlink ferry at the Gunwharf car ferry terminal in Portsmouth, 2023. Photo: Tim Sheerman-Chase / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Storms, vacuum pads and ABB's robot at the ferry berth

On 23 October, in Storm Austen, Brittany Ferries' Commodore Clipper broke its forward mooring lines while berthed in Le Havre, where it had been for about a month with gearbox problems, and tugs had to help reposition it. On 30 September Virgin Voyages' Scarlet Lady broke several lines in strong waves at Rhodes. Its gangway fell into the water and the ship made contact with a catamaran and two other boats before the captain brought it back to the berth. No injuries were reported either time, but Australian Mining notes that snapback from mooring lines is a leading cause of serious injury and death in ports.

Commodore Clipper, then in Condor Ferries colours, at Portsmouth in 2013. The ship broke its forward mooring lines in Le Havre during Storm Austen in October 2026. Photo: Mike Peel / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Cavotec says more than 430 MoorMaster systems are installed and have completed over 1.5 million moorings, with a ship held in under 30 seconds. In August it was chosen to install India's first automated mooring system at Gateway Terminals India, a container terminal at Jawaharlal Nehru Port in Navi Mumbai. The port expects it to take at least an hour off every berthing and unberthing, cut the gap between ships from 25 m to 15 m and let operators shift a ship up to 6 m along the quay without tugs. Trelleborg's AutoMoor vacuum units went into service at Qingdao in January. At Mineral Resources' Onslow Iron port in Western Australia, MacGregor hooks with a 60 tonne capacity latch onto purpose-built bollards when a transhipper comes alongside.

MoorMaster MM200B vacuum units holding a ship at an iron ore handling berth in Port Hedland, Western Australia. Photo: Cavotec

We found no ABB mooring product and no ABB robot handling mooring lines, but ABB robots do a related job at the berth. On the 4 km route between Helsingør and Helsingborg, ABB supplied the batteries and power systems that turned the ferries Tycho Brahe and Aurora into battery ferries, plus the first automated shore-side charging stations, built around its IRB 7600 industrial robot. Laser scanning and wireless links between ship and shore guide the approach. In the last 400 mm the robot reaches out, pulls the shore cable from the ship and moves its connectors onto matching connectors below. Prevas, which built the stations, says a charge takes 5 to 9 minutes, enough for the 20 minute crossing.

The ferry Tycho Brahe in dry dock during its conversion to battery power, a project in which ABB supplied the power systems and the robot charging stations. Photo: ABB

Mooring and charging become one docking job

Recent orders tie mooring and charging together. In December 2025 the Danish operator Molslinjen ordered MoorMaster NxG units worth about EUR 2 million for its ports at Odden and Aarhus. They will hold its battery catamarans in place for fast shore connection and charging, with delivery due in the third quarter of 2027, and MoorMaster already works at Danish ports such as Ballen, Kalundborg and Fynshav. Cavotec says the pads also let electric ferries switch off their thrusters while they charge. A ship held still should also be an easier target for a charging robot, and Prevas named forecasting ship motion as the hardest part of the Øresund stations.

An ABB IRB 7600, the robot model used in the Øresund ferry charging stations, here holding a wax tree in a falling sand curtain at TPC Components in Sweden. Photo: ABB

Gateway Terminals India cannot extend its 712 m quay, which is why it turned to automated mooring. It will test the system on one berth before a second, with operation expected by the end of 2027. Crewless boats push from another side, since a ferry with no deckhands cannot throw its own lines; our post on the autonomous ferry covers ABB's remote-control trial in Helsinki. ABB has also shown a plug-in robot for electric mining trucks, the eMine Robot Automated Connection Device, due for testing at Boliden's Aitik mine from late 2024. ABB robots at more berths remain a possibility with no announced project, and a cell that must follow a moving hull is the kind of layout engineers test first in RobotStudio.

ABB's eMine Robot Automated Connection Device, a plug-in robot for electric mining trucks, on show at MINExpo 2024. Photo: ABB

Cost, fit and skills are the open problems. Molslinjen's order works out at about EUR 2 million for two ports. Vacuum pads need a flat hull to grip, and the Seaway found that ships with too little freeboard or a steep hull angle, such as some Coast Guard vessels, could not use them. Mineral Resources says its hooks remove ropes 95 percent of the time, so crews still have to know how to handle lines. Cavotec offers round-the-clock remote monitoring of its units, but someone on the quay still has to repair the hydraulics, vacuum pumps and sensors when they fail, storm or no storm.

Engineers with an ABB IRB 5710, a large robot for heavy handling. Photo: ABB

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