Conferences
23–27 May 2022, Philadelphia (PA), USA
Innovation in Forestry Robotics: Research and Industry Adoption (IFRRIA), Workshop at IEEE ICRA 2022
The IFRRIA workshop will present a fruitful environment to discuss the latest advances, research challenges, and the industry adoption of robotics in forestry and related fields. The diverse points of view of researchers, stakeholders, and policymakers will encourage a rich discussion between attendees and the public in general.
The use of technology and automation is an increasingly important requirement for many primary economic activities such as agriculture, mining, or forestry. Factors such as population growth, climate change, or the shifting of business models due to recent world changes have placed additional pressure on these industries to improve productivity while maintaining sustainability. Forestry is an industry that presents ample potential for automation and the use of robotic systems to perform specific tasks. Forestry involves a variety of tasks that pose a number of challenges for robotic research in several aspects. Inventory, planting, harvesting, monitoring, or wildfire prevention are examples of activities requiring state-of-the-art solutions in terms of hardware, control, locomotion, localization, path planning, perception, and decision making. Despite the many advances in these areas individually, the development and deployment of field robots for precision forestry that embrace new findings is still at a very early stage, and their practical application in this industry is still limited. Examples include but are not limited to off-road autonomous navigation, complaint hardware design, flying in extreme microclimates, or perception of the environment at different levels (including uncertainty).
This workshop will present an overview of the application of robotics in forestry and will create a twofold discussion environment: i) about vanguard technical solutions from the robotics community for the current limitations for design, perception, navigation control; and ii) about the short- and medium-term needs of forest workers, stakeholders, managers, or policy makers and how they envision the use of robotic technology in the industry.
We aim to create an environment to discuss not only the technical aspects of automation in forestry and other related industries, but also the societal impacts and how the technologies that researchers are developing are perceived by stakeholders and how new findings can be funded or adopted commercially.
Workshop Webpage: https://labs.ri.cmu.edu/ifrria-icra-2022/
