Advances in Forest Robotics: A State-of-the-Art Survey

Abstract

The development of robotic systems to operate in forest environments is of great relevance for the public and private sectors. In this sense, this article reviews several scientific papers, research projects and commercial products related to robotic applications for environmental preservation, monitoring, wildfire firefighting, inventory operations, planting, pruning and harvesting. After conducting critical analysis, the main characteristics observed were: (a) the locomotion system is directly affected by the type of environmental monitoring to be performed; (b) different reasons for pruning result in different locomotion and cutting systems; (c) each type of forest, in each season and each type of soil can directly interfere with the navigation technique used; and (d) the integration of the concept of swarm of robots with robots of different types of locomotion systems (land, air or sea) can compensate for the time of executing tasks in unstructured environments. Two major areas are proposed for future research works: Internet of Things (IoT)-based smart forest and navigation systems. It is expected that, with the various characteristics exposed in this paper, the current robotic forest systems will be improved, so that forest exploitation becomes more efficient and sustainable.