Lithium Guardian Detect screens vehicles at your gate for concealed lithium battery cargo — using magnetic anomaly detection refined by Cortex AI. No X-ray. No physical search. No driver delay.
Lithium battery packs contain a distinctive mix of ferromagnetic and paramagnetic materials — steel cans, copper foil, nickel tabs — arranged in a periodic, multi-cell pattern. That arrangement creates a magnetic signature unlike anything else in normal cargo. Lithium Guardian Detect reads that signature as a vehicle passes the gate.
The sensor pillar — a discreet bollard-style unit at the depot gate — wakes when an ANPR camera or trigger beam detects an inbound vehicle. The dual-sensor fluxgate gradiometer begins logging at 1 kHz.
Every vehicle has its own magnetic baseline. ANPR identifies make and model; the AI subtracts the expected signature, leaving only what's extra — the cargo's contribution to the field.
The Cortex AI classifier returns a confidence score and approximate location of any concealed pack. Cleared vehicles pass through. Flagged vehicles get diverted for manifest check or visual inspection.
Magnetic anomaly detection has been used by NATO navies to find submarines since the 1940s, by archaeologists to map iron artefacts, and by UXO surveyors to clear minefields. The science is mature. What's new is doing it at depot scale, at vehicle pace, with an AI classifier that knows what a battery looks like.
Two precision magnetometers, vertically separated. Subtracting one from the other cancels Earth's field and uniform background noise — leaving only local anomalies.
Different van models have different magnetic signatures. ANPR identifies the vehicle, Cortex AI subtracts the expected baseline, and we classify only what shouldn't be there.
Battery packs produce periodic field patterns from cell-to-cell spacing — a fingerprint a single solid lump of metal can't reproduce. The classifier learns the difference.
The system measures, it doesn't transmit. No X-ray exposure, no RF emissions to license, no images captured — just the Earth's field and the cargo's response to it.
Lithium Guardian Detect is sold as a depot-gate installation under the EM8 Portal subscription model — a sensor pillar pair, an ANPR camera, and a per-gate licence. Same hub family, same Cortex AI, same Portal integration as the rest of the Guardian platform.
Every parcel hub in the country struggles with senders dropping off lithium packs declared as "electronics" or "spare parts". One battery fire on a sortation belt can take a £20m facility offline for days. Detect screens every inbound van before contents touch the network.
Mixed waste loads are the leading cause of UK MRF fires — a single hidden e-bike battery in a baler is enough to take a site out for weeks. Screen every inbound waste vehicle before it tips, and divert anything that fails for manual sort.
Self-storage operators are increasingly being asked by insurers to demonstrate lithium-screening procedures. Detect pairs with your existing access control to flag tenants bringing in undeclared battery cargo, before it goes into a unit you can't see into.
Fleet operators don't always know what their drivers are carrying — and home-charged e-bike batteries left in a van overnight have caused multiple total-loss vehicle fires. Detect gives operators visibility, and gives insurers a measurable risk reduction to price against.
Detect doesn't work in isolation. Every gate is connected through EM8 Portal to ANPR Guardian — our number-plate intelligence platform — and to a shared learning database that gets sharper with every vehicle that passes through any partner site in the country.
When a van rolls past one of your gates, the system already knows what that specific vehicle should look like magnetically — because it's been seen before, or because its make and model has been characterised across hundreds of similar vehicles on the network. Anomalies stand out faster, false positives drop, and repeat offenders get flagged before they reach your barrier.
The Detect pillar mounts at the gate, on the verge or in the ground. It looks like a standard depot bollard — because that's largely what it is, with a precision sensing core and a Cortex AI hub inside. Designed and 3D-printed in-house in Cardiff for site-specific variants.
Pairs with an ANPR camera (existing or supplied) and ties into the EM8 Portal under the same subscription system as Surveillance Guardian, Tracking Guardian and the rest of the Guardian family.
Request a site survey →Lithium Guardian Detect is being trialled with selected couriers, waste operators and fleet partners through 2026. Talk to us about an early-access deployment.