Towards a Semiautonomous Young Spruce Forest Late Cleaning
Loading...
Access rights
openAccess
CC BY-NC
CC BY-NC
publishedVersion
URL
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä
This publication is imported from Aalto University research portal.
View publication in the Research portal (opens in new window)
View/Open full text file from the Research portal (opens in new window)
Other link related to publication (opens in new window)
View publication in the Research portal (opens in new window)
View/Open full text file from the Research portal (opens in new window)
Other link related to publication (opens in new window)
Unless otherwise stated, all rights belong to the author. You may download, display and print this publication for Your own personal use. Commercial use is prohibited.
Date
Major/Subject
Mcode
Degree programme
Language
en
Pages
19
Series
Journal of Field Robotics
Abstract
Cleaning a seedling spruce stand is an important silvicultural task required to help the young spruce trees thrive. It is usually manual work with a clearing saw. Mechanized solutions have been proposed, but they have not worked out well, since the driver has challenges in seeing the seedling trees that should be left growing. Instead, we demonstrate that a semiautonomous forest machine could do the cleaning operation using a suitable map of the environment. We propose using a low-cost unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to map the area beforehand, and a real-time perception system onboard the forest machine performing the semiautonomous late cleaning of a seedling spruce stand with the help of a driver using a dedicated human–machine interface (HMI). In the proposed solution, overlapping color images are collected by a UAV to build a map that integrates both color and depth information. This map is used to detect the young spruce trees, among other species. We also propose a graph-based point-cloud matching method, which can precisely locate the forest machine on the map using forest machine-mounted sensors. An HMI is developed to improve the situational awareness of the operator in the forest machine cabin during the cleaning process. The proposed integrated solution has been demonstrated in a real seedling spruce forest.Description
Publisher Copyright: © 2025 The Author(s). Journal of Field Robotics published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.
Other note
Citation
Ouattara, I, Hallikas, J, Hyyti, H & Visala, A 2025, 'Towards a Semiautonomous Young Spruce Forest Late Cleaning', Journal of Field Robotics. https://doi.org/10.1002/rob.22539