ATREF: Application of Robotic Technologies to Forestry Equipment

Canada is one of the world's leading forestry nations, and luckily there are still some Canadian world class forestry equipment manufacturers. This is all the more important since new technology in the resource industries is most easily introduced by equipment manufacturers, not end-users. The four-year, 2.2 M$ ATREF project is one large-scale attempt in Canada to address this issue, by bringing together key players within the province of Quebec: Denharco, one of Canada's leading forestry equipment manufacturers, Autolog, an independent company specialising in computerised control and embedded systems, the eastern division of the Forestry Engineering Research Institute of Canada (FERIC), two universities (Laval, McGill) and CRIM, a nonprofit computer science research institute with a mission to promote technology transfer. ATREF began in Jan. 1994 and in this article the authors report on their early work.