Autonomous Tower Crane Tech and Where ABB Fits

A tower crane lifts almost everything on a high-rise site, and for more than 70 years it has usually been driven by an operator in a small cab at the top of the tower. An autonomous tower crane would move loads by itself while people supervise from the ground. This post covers how crane work was done from the cab and the remote cockpits that brought operators down to ground level in Britain. It then looks at Obayashi's tests of remote and autonomous cranes in Japan and Singapore, ABB's crane automation in ports and ABB robots on building sites, and what still stands in the way.

The operator's cabin of a tower crane in Dubai, 2010. Photo: Titoni Thomas / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

How tower cranes were run from the cab

Cranes go back thousands of years, but the tower crane builders use today dates from 1949, when Hans Liebherr built the first mobile tower crane, the TK10. A tower crane stands on a concrete base and is sometimes tied to the building. A slewing unit on top of the mast turns the long jib, the counter-jib carries concrete counterweights, and the operator's cab usually sits at the top of the tower, although it can also hang on the jib or partway down the mast. Inside are the controls, a load moment indicator, a scale and an anemometer. Tower cranes can reach a height under the hook of more than 100 metres.

The Rapid III lightweight tower crane by VEB Verlade- und Transportanlagenbau Leipzig at the Leipzig spring fair, March 1957. Photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-45000-0150 / Schlegel, Opitz / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE)

The operator rarely works alone. A signaller, known as a dogger, rigger or swamper, directs the order of lifts and is responsible for the safety of the rigging and loads, and the two are most often in radio contact and always use hand signals. Some cranes could already be driven by radio remote control from the ground. On high-rise sites, though, the operator normally climbed the mast to the cab and judged each load through its windows, dozens of metres above the site. Remote cockpits were built to remove that climb and that narrow view.

A tower crane operator in his cabin, feet up, above the King's Cross Central development in London, 2019. Photo: Acabashi / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Moving the cab to the ground came first. In July 2023 the British lifting firm Radius Group launched remote control for tower cranes with the Israeli company Skyline Cockpit, so that operators drive the crane from a cabin on site with three large panoramic screens. Radius said the system saves more than an hour a day, lets an operator switch between cranes on a multi-crane site in 10 to 15 minutes and opens the job to older, infirm and disabled people. In September 2024 Winvic's Crown Place Birmingham, a 33-storey student housing tower, made headlines as the first UK site to use a remote-controlled tower crane.

The operator's cabin of a tower crane on St. Martin's Le Grand in the City of London, 2024. Remote cockpits move this seat to the ground. Photo: Acabashi / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Remote cockpits, digital twins and port crane automation

Remote cockpits now add software on top of the cameras. Skyline Cockpit stitches several camera views, from the trolley winch to the hook and load line, into one display, adds augmented reality to show where a load will land and gives alerts and weather-based adjustments. It can be retrofitted to existing tower cranes and lets one operator manage several cranes, and it won the Digital Innovation in Productivity category at the Digital Construction Awards 2025. The version launched in 2023 already showed load weight, wind speed and direction and crane height in real time, and used machine learning to flag risks.

The top of a yellow tower crane with its cabin and counterweights, 2022. Photo: Anthony O'Neil / Geograph via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Japan's Obayashi is working toward cranes that run themselves. In May 2025 it described ORCISM, a system for remote, automated and autonomous operation that it is testing on two tower cranes of the 720 and 360 ton-metre classes at its East Japan Robotics Center in Kawagoe. A digital twin of each crane and its surroundings detects obstructions, watches load sway and can slow or stop the crane. In Singapore, Obayashi and the Housing Board finished their first joint Tengah flat project in June 2026. On 19 September HDB said an intelligent lifting frame, trialled with a tower crane in Jurong West, lets operators fine-tune lifting points remotely and could cut hoisting man-hours by 30 percent.

Construction at the JS3 Tengah MRT station site in Singapore's new Tengah town, 2024. Photo: ZKang123 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

We found no ABB system for tower cranes, so ABB's role here is a possibility, but ABB already automates large cranes in ports, as our post on container terminals describes. In May 2026 it launched Waterside Automation for ship-to-shore cranes, which combines vision and motion sensors with data analytics and AI to pick up and set down containers over the vessel automatically. Operators supervise and manage several cranes from an office instead of driving each one, and ABB calls this a stepwise transition toward autonomous quay crane operations. Tower cranes also have to cope with swinging loads and wind, so supervised automation of this kind could carry over to building sites.

Ship-to-shore cranes of the kind ABB's Waterside Automation is built to run under supervision from an office. Photo: ABB

What it will take to take the operator out of the cab

Cranes are only part of the automation on a building site. ABB Robotics says only 55 percent of construction companies use robots, against 84 percent in automotive and 79 percent in manufacturing, and that robots can make sites safer by handling large and heavy loads. In Gananoque, Canada, the developer Horizon Legacy used VAL 2.0, a modified ABB six-axis robot for 3D concrete printing, to build 26 townhouses with robots working entirely on site. The team programmed it in RobotStudio and made changes during the build. Cranes that follow the same digital plan could one day keep robots like this supplied with material.

Horizon Legacy's VAL 2.0, a modified ABB six-axis robot, printing a concrete wall on site in Gananoque, Ontario. Photo: ABB

For homes, the first effects are showing up in public housing. Singapore's HDB says its two Tengah projects are on track for 25 percent higher site productivity than its baseline of 0.6 square metres per man-day. Part of that comes from prefabrication, which moved more structural work off site and reduced crane use. The tower crane of the next decade may therefore make fewer lifts of large precast parts, steadied by a device on the hook and driven from a cabin on the ground. ABB, for its part, argues that experience from cars and manufacturing could squeeze 50 years of progress in construction into 5 to 10 years.

The print head on Horizon Legacy's ABB robot, which built 26 townhouses with robots working entirely on site. Photo: ABB

Obayashi and Singapore's JTC, which signed a construction robotics agreement in July 2026, list what still holds the technology back: the cost of introducing and running it, adapting to conditions on each site, training the people who operate it, and the lack of standards and regulations. Remote cockpits show that the first step is possible today, because they can be fitted to existing cranes. Full autonomy is harder. Every lift still needs riggers to hook and unhook the load, and the HDB frame was built so that those workers can stand at a safer distance while heavy precast parts are lowered into place.

ETH Zurich's In situ Fabricator, an ABB IRB 4600 on a tracked base, building a curved wall. Photo: Gramazio Kohler Research, ETH Zurich / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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