Opportunities for remote controlled and autonomous machinery.
Forest and Wood Products Australia have produced a new report that examines remote controlled and autonomous machinery in forestry. The report was compiled Rien Visser, of the School of Forestry, University of Canterbury, New Zealand. Logging provides some excerpts from the document. Technology development, in terms of both capability and cost-effective integration, is moving at a fast pace. While advanced robotic systems are already commonplace in controlled workspaces such as factories, the use of remote controlled or autonomous machines in more complex environments, such as for forest operations, is in its infancy.
While technology integration and automation in forestry equipment are commonplace, the report focuses on equipment developments and opportunities where no operator is in the machine. The simplest form is remote control of the machine where the operator, typically in clear line-of sight, will work with wireless controls. While teleoperation is simply a more technical term for remote control, often implied is that the operator works from a virtual environment with live video and audio feedback from the machine. Since teleoperation provides a similar operator experience to working in the machine, it is relatively easy for an operator to transition to teleoperation.
For both systems the machine operation is typically slower, significantly so if the task is complex, and will not be adopted in forest operations strictly based on productivity improvements. However, benefits can quickly accrue when: (a) operator safety might be compromised, (b) where a full-time operator would be underutilised, or (c) where work sites are onerous to reach or suitably qualified operators are hard to find.
The hardware and technology exist to make almost any aspect of forest operations autonomous. However, for forest operations that are complex and require visual inputs for decision making, software requirements will restrict its implementation. The extraction and subsequent transportation of stems / logs with GPS-guided systems are most likely to be the first operations that become robotic and can be achieved with modest R&D investment in the near future. Source