According to an article by Scott McQueen (2019), Finland’s forests make up three-quarters of the country’s land. The Finnish Forest Centre is in charge of overseeing the conservation of this massive area and hence came up with an ambitious solution to use robots to autonomously execute most of the forest conservation tasks.
Manual harvesting is definitely inefficient in the long run to meet up with demands and with the lack of manpower. There is a depletion lack of interest in forestry jobs due to the job being time-consuming and pretty dull since it is a lonely job.
Firstly, the data used has to be precise and attainable before the Finnish Forest Centre can train the robots. They use aerial and lidar imagery to construct forest inventories, record tree measurements, and species information. All the data required by the robot is then placed in a geographic information system (GIS).
The development director of the Finnish Forest Centre, Hamalainen, and his team see robots bringing benefits. People owning more than 65% of Finland’s forests can have simpler and more proactive management of their forests.
To produce precise data and decrease the amount of work in the field, the Finnish Forest Centre is using AI. By combining the data from GIS, imagery sources, climate and weather datasets, precise measurements of the forest can be obtained, and improve forest inventory predictions. It can also detect signs of spruce bark beetle attacks. Through AI, Hamalainen states that “we want the data to be so accurate that users can see and sell without having to go to the forest”. Currently, 85% of the cases have reliable data, while the remaining 15% is being improved.
The machine testing algorithms are being tested to extract the same measurements that were previously required in person inspection crews. AI can also provide the relevant information of the volume and species of wood without being present on the land which is costly and time-consuming.
No comments:
Post a Comment