Abstract
Forestry and agricultural robotics are growing areas of research within the field of Robotics. Recent developments in planning, perception and mobility in unstructured outdoor environments have allowed the proliferation of innovative autonomous machines. The SEMFIRE project proposes a robotic system to support the removal of flammable material in forests, thus assisting in landscaping maintenance tasks and avoiding the deflagration of wildfires. In this work, we describe work in progress on the development of the Ranger, a large heavy-duty forestry machine based on the well-known Bobcat T190, which is the main actor of SEMFIRE. We present the design of the machine, which has been expanded with several sensors, its full integration in the Robot Operating System, as well as preliminary results.
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Acknowledgements
We are sincerely thankful to Gonçalo S. Martins, Pedro Machado, Dora Lourenço, Hugo Marques, Miguel Girão, Daryna Datsenko, João Aguizo, Ahmad Kamal Nasir, Tolga Han and the ROS community for their contributions to this work.
This work was supported by the Safety, Exploration and Maintenance of Forests with Ecological Robotics (SEMFIRE, ref. CENTRO-01-0247-FEDER-03269) and the Centre of Operations for Rethinking Engineering (CORE, ref. CENTRO-01-0247-FEDER-037082) research projects co-funded by the “Agência Nacional de Inovação” within the Portugal2020 programme.
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Portugal, D., Andrada, M.E., Araújo, A.G., Couceiro, M.S., Ferreira, J.F. (2021). ROS Integration of an Instrumented Bobcat T190 for the SEMFIRE Project. In: Koubaa, A. (eds) Robot Operating System (ROS). Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 962. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75472-3_3
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