Speaker
Description
Ongoing climate change and associated damaging events are leading to a significant need for large-scale forest regeneration. The key challenge is to efficiently address the increasing demand for reforestation despite a shortage of skilled workers by means of automated processes. In Germany, reforestation is still predominantly carried out manually and is associated with high labour intensity. First planting machines as well as excavator-based planting attachments are available; however, due to limited productivity, their adoption in operational practice remains low. In parallel, approaches for drone-based seeding are being explored, but these currently achieve only limited establishment success due to insufficient soil contact and the lack of precise positioning.
The establishment of the next tree generation represents the starting point of resilient forest value chains. Here planting operations are of central importance. Automated and digitally supported planting systems offer the potential to perform this key task more efficient, reproducible, and less labour-intensive.
Against this background, the ForestBots research project, funded by the German Federal Ministry for Research, Technology and Space within the funding initiative “Digital GreenTech – Environmental Technology Meets Robotics” (FKZ: 02WDG1760A), addresses the development of a collaborative system for automated reforestation. The objective of the project is to demonstrate a semi-autonomous forest operation using a small swarm of fully electric tracked vehicles for seedling planting.
This contribution focuses on the systematic analysis of the process chain as a foundation for the development of automated and digital planting systems based on autonomous mobile robots (AMR). The requirements for an automated planting process were derived based on a comprehensive analysis of the state of research and technology, a patent and market review, as well as expert interviews and workshops with forest nurseries and forestry stakeholders, including the Lower Saxony State Forests and the Chamber of Agriculture. These include, among others, seedling characteristics, operational timing, and relevant environmental and site conditions.
Based on this, the overall process of seedling planting was broken down into its essential functional subprocesses. These include system coordination at the global level, seedling handling and logistics, as well as a detailed analysis of the planting process itself. For each subprocess, dependencies, interfaces, and critical tasks with particular relevance for automation were identified.
The results provide a structured description of functions and processes as a basis for further concept development and for the integration of sensors, actuators, and data-driven decision-making. The study thus contributes to the development of robust, semi-autonomous, and digitally connected systems for reforestation.
| Keywords | reforestation; autonomous; robots; planting |
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