Planning of forest transportation is a complex problem that requires effective and harmonious design implementation various operations including extraction, loading, hauling products. These constitute significant part the total cost producing products; therefore, developing most appropriate (minimum cost/maximum net profit) plan has increasing importance for economic aspect. Computer-aided mode...

Productivity assessment studies are essential in forest operations, mainly because their results enable operational planning and rate setting, the development of equitable payment systems, environmental performance, improvements brought by technology development, optimization larger forest-based systems. This study examines productive performance fuel consumption farm-tractor based skidding ope...

Localization methods for mobile platforms are commonly based on an observation model that matches onboard sensors measures and environmental a priori knowledge. However, their effectiveness relies on the reliability of the observation model, which is usually very sensitive to the presence of unmodelled elements in the environment. Mismatches between the navigation map, itself an imperfect repre...

Nacrtak Forest roads are an essential yet costly part of forest management, and optimization methods are important tools for planning road systems to support harvesting. This paper presents a Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) optimization model to design a forest access system consisting of logging roads for trucking and access spurs for skidding. The network designed is hierarchical in the sense...

The Articulated Wheeled Vehicle (AWV) paradigm examines a class of wheeled vehicles where the chassis is connected via articulated chains to a set of ground-contact wheels. Activelyor passivelycontrolled articulations can help alter wheel placement with respect to chassis during locomotion, endowing the vehicle with significant reconfigurability and redundancy. The ensuing ‘leg-wheeled’ systems...

The Articulated Wheeled Vehicle (AWV) paradigm examines a class of wheeled vehicles where the chassis is connected via articulated chains to a set of ground-contact wheels. Activelyor passivelycontrolled articulations can help alter wheel placement with respect to chassis during locomotion, endowing the vehicle with significant reconfigurability and redundancy. The ensuing ‘leg-wheeled’ systems...

Caucasian alder is a large tree and one of the commercial species in the Caspian forests. We investigated the wound healing rate (WHR) and compared the diameter growth (DG) of 66 wounded and 66 unwounded alder trees 15 years after selected logging in these forests. The conditions of the wounds after 15 years were as follows: 56.1% had closed, 25.7% were open, and 18.2% had decayed. The mean WHR...

This paper proposes the new cascaded series parallel design for improved dynamic performance of DC-DC buck boost converters by a new Sliding Mode Control (SMC) method. The converter is controlled using Sliding Mode Control method that utilizes the converter’s duty ratio to determine the skidding surface. System modeling and simulation results are presented. The results also showed an improved o...

Many tasks examined for robotic application like rescue missions or humanitarian demining require a robotic vehicle to navigate in unstructured natural terrain. This paper introduces a motion control for a four-wheeled offroad vehicle trying to tackle the problems arising. These include rough ground, steep slopes, wheel slippage, skidding and others that are difficult to grasp with a physical m...