Swedish scientists have designed the world’s first unmanned machine for autonomous forestry operations, a breakthrough in the push towards a fully automated forest management and production process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is the latest discovery by the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, which has spent decades pushing to transition from highly labour-intensive harvesting operated by skilled operators to improve productivity, reduce safety hazards and stimulate forest economies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In recent years, the world’s largest forest machine manufacturers (including John Deere, Komatsu and others) have embraced basic automation technology into new machine prototypes to make control machines more intuitive for operators. However, those developments still revolve around skilled operators having complete autonomy over the machine controls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Until now, the vast majority of fully autonomous testing has occurred in small to medium-sized lab tests, with forest-based testing challenged due to difficulties in the automation of outdoor robots.<\/p>\n\n\n\n