Toward Autonomous Vehicles and Machinery in Mill Yards of the Forest Industry: Technologies and Proposals for Autonomous Vehicle Operations

Abstract

The use of autonomous systems on the wood processing sites of forest industries can significantly increase safety, productivity, and efficiency by reducing the number of monotonous and dangerous tasks conducted by human labor utilizing heavy machinery. However, autonomous machines are challenging and difficult to implement in the mill yards environment because of the dynamic and complex working environment, and partly unstructured processes. The inherent complexity of wood handling and storage tasks is requiring significant human expertise. Fast advancements in sensor technologies, machine learning techniques, and increases in the computational power enable progress in automated operation framework and algorithms development. This opens the door to introduce novel autonomous systems into this environment. With the aim of gaining a better understanding of current issues and facilitating optimal strategies for deploying high-level autonomous systems for the mill yard environments, this study: (1) Utilized a systematic literature review to map current autonomous technologies and algorithms suitable for adoption by the forest industry in automation of vehicles working in mill yards; (2) Summarizes and discusses the potential feasibility of the considered sensors and systems, adaption strategy, and high-level autonomous machinery implementation challenges in the mill yard environment; and (3) Proposes a system framework that integrates multiple technologies to enable autonomous navigation and material handling in mill yards. The study is the first of its kind as a comprehensive study on autonomous vehicles and machinery in mill yard environments. Our novel framework aids in the identification of follow-up research areas and thus promotes the adoption and use of complex autonomous systems in industrial environments.

Warehouse Management Systems for Social and Environmental Sustainability: A Systematic Literature Review and Bibliometric Analysis

“…In this case, if the high demand for sustainable warehousing comes from the government, policymakers, producers, or even end customers, warehousing companies should be prepared and know what to do, why, and when. One potential higherlevel integration of automatization optimization in the WMS context could be self-operating autonomous vehicles [92] in the restricted parts of warehouses and their surrounding yards to be controlled by the WMS. In the long term, WMS could be developed to handle largerscale fleets [93,94], and improve their optimization capabilities in warehouse environments.…”

Real-time target point identification and automated log grasping by a forwarder, using a single stereo camera for both object detection and boom-tip control

“…According to Lundbäck (2022), autonomous loading has a higher economic potential than autonomous driving during forwarding work, since loading is the most time consuming work element. Another advantage of autonomous systems in forestry is the potential to increase safety, by reducing dangerous tasks performed by human operators of heavy machinery (Abdelsalam et al 2022).…”

From Satellite to UAV-Based Remote Sensing: A Review on Precision Agriculture

“…In addition, a research done in India has reported that up to 37% of the overall losses in seed yield of paddy are caused by uncontrolled weed growth [7], among a host of other challenges. Therefore, it could be seen that there are huge gaps of enablement through technology that could be explored in this domain for the betterment of society, and remote sensing is a key component due to the sheer scale and coverage required in agriculture, e.g., like water usage and lost preventive systems [8], industry scale autonomous vehicles [9] and IoT based solutions with humanitarian thoughts [10] and so on.…”