Scion working towards fully automated forest
IMAGINE A HARVESTING OPERATION WHERE ALL THE TREES are cut by robots swinging from tree-to-tree and the stems are automatically passed along a line of similar robots to a machine that cuts them into logs, which are then loaded onto a truck without a single human present.
It’s a future that Scion is working towards and the Rotorua-based research organisation has produced an animated video that it hopes will encourage partners to join and help fund and developed the project.
The fully autonomous harvesting system is based on the ‘swinging skeleton’ devised for the former Future Forest Research Steepland harvesting programme.
When FFR became the Forest Growers Research (FGR) organisation the ‘swinging skeleton’ was set aside because it was considered too futuristic and unlikely to be perfected any time soon, and it would also require considerable investment.
But scientists at Scion believe it still has merit and have been quietly working behind the scenes to keep the project alive, which led to the production of the video (which can be viewed by going to the www. nzlogger.co.nz website for a link to the Youtube footage).
The video, called Tree-to-Tree Locomotion, had its first public viewing at the Woodflow 2018 forestry logistics conference in Rotorua last month and caused quite a stir.
The two-and-half-minute animated clip shows a number of robotic machines swinging on trees, much like the original ‘swinging’ skeleton’ until one stops to cut down a tree and then passes it to a ‘skeleton’ behind, which passes it back another ‘skeleton’ and so on, until the logs are finally loaded onto a driverless log truck.
The video also shows similar machines under-taking thinning and pruning operations in young forests and various other tasks. Dr Richard Parker, from Scion, says it can be hard to explain how they envisage a fully automated harvesting operation and the video enables them to do just that and his team is delighted with the response.
NZL