Autonomous Forwarder Navigation for Forestry Applications

​The forestry industry all over the world is seeing the need for modernization of forestry machines toward autonomy. Canada, Sweden, Australia, and other countries are among the major players.

This demonstration is a proof-of-concept for the autonomous navigation of a forwarder. The machine navigates among obstacles such as trees and rocks to reach the logs that are cut and ready to be transported to the highway. The dynamics of the forwarder is simulated in Vortex from CMLabs. Then, RT-LAB/Orchestra is used to monitor all subsystems of the demo, to communicate back and forth with Vortex, and to implement the navigation controller.