A novel forestry information-collecting mobile system

Automatic forestry mobile system is needed to perform the information-collecting tasks, which could not only improve the efficiency but also free the mankind from the heavy labour. In this paper, a set of automatic system is proposed. It consists of a novel multi-mode robot and a visual information-collecting system. The multi-mode robot is designed by utilizing the Schatz linkage, and it could surmount obstacles to traverse the rough terrain in the forest. The switch between the mobile modes is realised by the shape of the touchdown link of the robot, which avoid the inconvenience of switching mechanism. The visual information-collecting system is built with an RGB-D camera, a mechanical arm and a lower computer. The system could collect the forestry information from the images captured by the camera. A prototype of the system is fabricated and assigned the task to measure the breast diameters (DBH) of the experimental trees. The data is compared with the data that measured manually, and the results verify that the system could traverse the rough terrain in the forest and perform the forestry information-collecting task precisely.