ATREF: Application des Technologies Robotiques aux Equipements Forestiers

Canada is one of the world's leading forestry nations and luckily, there are still some Canadian world class forestry equipment manufacturers. This is all the more important since new technology in the resource industries is most easily introduced by equipment manufacturers, not end-users. The four year, 2.2M$ ATREF project is one recent large-scale attempt in Canada to address this issue, by bringing together key players within the province of Qu ebec: Denharco, one of Canada's leading forestry equipment manufacturers, Autolog, an independent company specialising in computerized control and embedded systems, the eastern division of the Forestry Engineering Research Institute of Canada (FERIC), two universities (Laval, McGill) and CRIM, a non-pro t computer science research institute with a mission to promote technology transfer. ATREF began in January 1994 and in this article, we report on