¶ Navigation, Environment mapping
| Company | Nature Robots |
| Country | Germany |
| Website | https://naturerobots.com/en/ |
| Category | Planning & Inventory › Remote sensing & mapping |
Navigation and small Autonomous robots for forestry and agroforestry systems
¶ Overview
Navigation and environment mapping in the context of forestry automation refers to the integrated set of technologies and algorithms that enable autonomous or semi-autonomous forestry machines — including harvesters, forwarders, and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) — to determine their precise location within a forest stand, construct or update a spatial model of the surrounding environment, and use that model to plan and execute safe, efficient movement through complex terrain. Navigation in forest environments is considerably more challenging than in structured settings such as roads or warehouses: GNSS signals are attenuated or multipath-degraded under dense canopy, the terrain is irregular and deformable, obstacles (tree stems, stumps, windthrow, large rocks, and slash piles) are dense and variable, and the environment changes continuously as harvesting progresses. To address these challenges, modern forest machine navigation systems fuse data from multiple sensor modalities — including GNSS receivers, IMUs, wheel odometry, and active ranging sensors such as 2D and 3D LiDAR — using probabilistic state estimation frameworks such as extended Kalman filters or factor graph optimisation. Environment mapping in forestry typically produces a local or global occupancy grid or point cloud map that encodes obstacle positions, terrain elevation and slope, soil trafficability zones, pre-defined extraction tracks, and environmentally sensitive exclusion areas; techniques such as SLAM (Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping) allow the machine to build and refine this map in real time without prior survey data. Research groups at universities including the University of Helsinki, Chalmers, and the Queensland University of Technology, as well as industry partners such as Ponsse, John Deere, and Komatsu Forest, are actively developing navigation and mapping systems for forestry, with the long-term goal of enabling lights-out autonomous harvesting shifts that improve productivity and remove operators from hazardous environments.
¶ Details
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Company | Nature Robots |
| Country | Germany |
| Type | Company |
| FWPA RD&E | 4.4 |