The reason why a pruning robot is actually a really good and important idea is that climbing trees and then holding on with one hand (or no hands) while sawing big heavy bits of them off is rather incredibly dangerous, with injury rates about 10 times that of working in a factory. This teleoperated robot means that you can stand very, very far away while the pruning gets done, and the ‘bot seems to do quite a good job, able to climb up and down trees with no trouble while cutting branches off in a spiral motion.

At 13 kilograms, the robot can drive straight up trees between 6 and 25 centimeters (2.3-9.8 in) in diameter at 0.25 m/s, while tackling branches with a diameter of less than 5 cm. It can automatically adapt to a variety of tree morphologies (that’s a thing, right?), and is relatively energy efficient (for whatever that’s worth) since it can support itself passively on the tree by using its own weight to securely grip the trunk.
via IEEE Spectrum

Continue reading 

Related

Tree climbing robot

"The robot was designed by a team at The Chinese University of Hong Kong for the express purpose of shimmying up trees autonomously, figuring out the best route up a trunk using built-in touch sensors." via Engadget Read more here.

Stanford team developing spiky robot “hedgehogs” to explore Phobos

Robot hedgehogs on the moons of Mars may sound like the title of a B-grade sci-fi movie, but that is what Stanford University is working on. Marco Pavone, an assistant professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and his team are developing spherical robots called “hedgehogs” that are about…

A map of all the trees in the U.S.

This map is the result of years of research by NASA, the National Geological Survey, and the U.S. Forest Service. It shows, in staggering detail, the total of woody biomass (read trees) across these United States. Presenting the entire nation at a 30 meter resolution, with 4 pixels representing an acre…