2017 NEW ZEALAND INSTITUTUE OF FORESTRY CONFERENCE
Members of the NZIF met in Rotorua last month to discuss future forestry trends and celebrate the institute’s achievers with their annual awards.
SHIFTING OPERATORS OUT OF FORESTRY MACHINE CABS INTO safer and more convenient environments won’t result in an overall reduction in the workforce.
We’ll still need people to service, maintain and repair equipment and employment numbers are likely to rise, according to senior Scion scientist, Dr Richard Parker.
He told the 2017 New Zealand Institute of Forestry annual conference in Rotorua last month that the move to automate forestry equipment and introduce artificial intelligence into the cab is inevitable.
“With machines becoming faster and faster, the operator is becoming the bottleneck in harvesting operations, so we are trying to use technology to help reduce the workload,” he says.
An example of how new technologies are already assisting is new Intelligent Boom Control system, recently introduced by John Deere and Komatsu, whereby the operator has fewer moves to make on the controls and just works the tips directly, because the machine itself takes care of the boom/arm cylinders, thus saving time.
Ultimately, the operator will be removed from the cab altogether and New Zealand is already experimenting with tele-operation of harvesting and backline machines. Big mining operations in Australia already have machines operated by people hundreds of kilometres away.
A further development will see fully autonomous machines driving themselves as artificial intelligence becomes practical and reliable.
In forestry, bucking / log making is being done by heads that automatically sense the size of a stem. Dr Parker believes the next step will see yarders fitted with grapples that can locate and grab stems from the slopes and that will lead to machines that can work fully autonomously.
“But we’re not going to have forests that are completely devoid of people,” he says.
“Even the mines in Australia that have tele-operated equipment have maintenance crews. There will be changes in employment for forestry and while there may be less operators on machines, they may end up with more maintenance staff because these machines are more complicated.
“Maintenance will be much more important because you don’t have an operator who can sense and even smell what’s going on with the machine.”
Dr Parker says there is also likely to be an increased need for people who can process and use the huge amounts of data sent by the machines. So there could be even more jobs in forestry in the future, but they will be different from what we have today.
One interesting development that could result from the introduction of automation, adds Dr Parker, is the ability to harvest currently uneconomic forests.
NZL