Speaker
Description
Rut formation, entailing both a disturbance of soil functions and impaired machine mobility, is a common risk when operating ground-based forest machines under unfavourable soil conditions. As a complement to technical approaches such as flotation tires or bogie tracks as well as planning support tools such as trafficability maps, we present a concept of trafficability prediction for a forwarder building upon measured wheel slip of the preceding harvester. In cut-to-length operations utilizing a wheeled harvester, this machine typically has lower wheel loads than the loaded forwarder which also tends to require a higher number of passes over the machine operating trail. Thus, forwarder traffic commonly contributes more to rut formation than harvester traffic. In our approach, wheel slip data of the harvester combined with accurate position tracing shall be exploited in a prediction model aimed at avoiding severe impact of forwarder traffic on forest soils at locations with sensitive soil conditions. During an initial experiment, a harvester and a forwarder working in sequence were consecutively equipped with a set of sensors for real-time wheel-slip measurement and positioning, and rut depth was measured after machine traffic using a mobile laser scanner. As a work-in-progress report from an ongoing project, the sensor equipment and data processing methods of the concept are outlined, and results from the initial experiment are presented.
| Keywords | machines; terramechanics; modelling; low-impact |
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