The pairing of robot and chainsaw sounds like the making of an ultimate Saturday night event, filled with raunchy 1980’s glam rock, cheap beer, mullets, and a gladiatorial arena ― destruction was man’s staple entertainment for centuries after all. But this chainsaw clad robot doesn’t actually compete with other robots in battle of cybernetic life or death, instead, it prunes branches.
True, Pruning Robot’s occupation may sound a bit on the softer side of the chainsaw-wielding robot spectrum, but if you’ve ever watched a video of anyone pruning branches on a tree, you’d know it’s a dangerous task that’s completely opposite of dainty. It’s dangerous as hell!
Branch pruners face injury rates 10 times higher than factory workers; there’s a lot of dangling by one hand while the other awkwardly grasps a chainsaw. Sometimes that dangling involves no hands. Once the branch is actually removed, the pruner must dodge as it comes crashing down. Replacing the human pruner with a teleoperated robot could potentially eliminate this danger all together.
Pruning Robot vertically scales trees, removing branches along the way
The robot was conceived by Yasuhiko Ishigure, Katsuyuki Hirai, and Haruhisa Kawasaki from Marutomi Seiko Co. and the University of Gifu, in Japan, and was first debuted at the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Mechatronics and Automations. Humbling (or awkwardly) named “A Pruning Robot With a Power-Saving Chainsaw Drive,” Pruning Robot is still in its prototype phase, but the 13 kilogram machine can climb straight up any tree between 6 and 25 centimeters in diameter at a rate of 0.25 meters per second.
All branches are sliced away in a spiral motion as the Pruning Robot makes its way up the trunk, adapting to the tree’s morphologies. The machine climbs by supporting itself passively on the tree, using its own weight to secure a firm grip, and then slowly rolls up the trunk using wheels. At the present, Pruning Robot has only been tested in a controlled environment where the trees are relatively straight and perfect, so a bit more effort must be made in order to make the robot more adaptable.
Finding a market niche for the robot may prove more challenging than actually streamlining the design, given the only real use for the robot would be in a conifer plantation, and even then it’s a matter of comparing the set-up/time cost of using the robot versus the amount of money spent on injury expenses. Commercial forestry operations are typically too large scale to take advantage of individual machines of this nature. Nonetheless, there’s no denying that the pairing of chainsaw and robot is just down right cool.
Via IEEE Spectrum
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