Shifting ropes with a drone

EXPERIMENTS USING A SMALL DRONE TO help speed up yarder moves are paying off for Gillion Logging in Otago.

Following the introduction of a much larger drone, strawlines are now being successfully flown across difficult ground in a fraction of the time it took for crew members to struggle on foot. That means a yarder can be shifted and operating again with minimal downtime.

Gillion’s Bill Winmill told the Harvest TECH 2017 conference in Rotorua that their use of drone technology had progressed to the point where it was now an essential piece of kit.

Bill began trialling the use of drones in his crew more than three years ago, but found that the smaller models were unable to carry a large payload, such as strawline rope. A keen fisherman, he came up with the idea of attaching lightweight fishing line, which could then be flown to the backline. The heavier rope was then pulled across with the fishing line.

But it was still fiddly and there was always a danger of the fishing line snapping.

Eventually Bill invested in a larger drone with a payload capacity of 20kg, which could pull up to 500 metres of 10mm Dyneema rope across to a backline.

To illustrate how quickly a strawline can be set up in this way, Bill showed a video clip of the new drone in action and told the audience the drone was only in the air for a total of 5 minutes and it took around 15 minutes to set it up for the flight.

With the strawline successfully flown into position, the Gillion crew merely needs to attach it to the winch on their bulldozer to pull the skyline across.

“Within 20-to-30 minutes you can have your skyline out to 600 metres – it’s really quick,” says Bill.

In addition to pioneering the use of drones in a harvesting operation, Gillion Logging has also developed and built its own winch-assist machine from scratch.

It, too, has proved to be very successful and a further machine has been sold to another harvesting crew in Otago.

NZL