In the context of auto-landing containers from a container ship to a truck or automatic guided vehicle and vice versa, this research investigates three schemes, one in Part I and two in Part II, for measuring the absolute position of a container. Coordinate transformations between the reference-coordinate, sensor-coordinate, and body-coordinate systems are briefly discussed. The scheme explored in Part I aims the use of three laser-slit sensors, which are relatively inexpensive. In this case, nine nonlinear equations are formulated for six unknown variables (three for orientation and three for position), so a closed-form solution is not available. Instead, an approximate solution through linearization was derived. An advantage of the method in Part I is its ability to measure an absolute position in 3D space, while a disadvantage is the computation time required to obtain pseudo-inverses and the approximate nature of the obtained solution. Numerical examples are provided.