With 30% of Poland still covered in forests, the nation’s foresters play many critical roles—soon to be aided with the world’s first goat-inspired forestry robot.
The robogoat is envisioned to perform many crucial tasks that foresters are trained to do in difficult terrain, including compiling tree inventories, land surveys, tick collection, species counting, and even archaeological surveying.
It’s being designed at the University of Life Sciences in Poznan (UPP) with the help of scientists from Italy and Cyprus, making it a cross-continental effort predicted to substantially aid in addressing forest-related issues as the continent struggles with a severe dearth of employees in the forestry profession.
With around 2,000 protected areas of forest in Europe, there’s no shortage of work that the robot, envisioned to cost around 1.8 million euro to develop, could or should do.
These span from the flat woodlands of the country’s Puszcza Zielonka National Park to rocky and uneven ground of a Mediterranean climate. As a result, mobility was to be a chief focus of this early stage in development.
“For now, we have the idea that this will be a walking robot, with legs similar to an Alpine chamois to enable it to move over steep mountain slopes,” UPP’s Anna Wierzbicka told TVP World, a Polish news agency that used AI to generate an image of what a goat-inspired forestry robot would look like.
Counting tree species, diagnosing them for pests or diseases, as well as recording other plant and animal species will be the robot’s main efforts. It’s normally a kind of work that requires specialists, “and there are fewer and fewer of them,” says Wierzbicka.
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“Additionally, inventorying such areas is hard fieldwork that also demands knowledge of plants and animals. [The robot] is a response to the decreasing availability of competent staff and would also satisfy the need to reach hard-to-access areas.”
“Ticks are also important for research reasons, so we decided that [enabling the robot to collect ticks] would be an interesting additional element that could contribute to improving our knowledge about them,” she adds.
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Archaeologists have joined the project to contribute their excavation and survey methods to perhaps enable the forestry robot to passively be scanning the ground over which it walks for artifacts.
Wierzbicka and her colleagues expect the first prototype to be ready by 2026, and an operation-ready model to be finished before 2030.
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