Imagine that you are a heavy equipment operator working in the forest industry and instead of an equipment cab, your place of work is a control room a few blocks from home that is equipped with joysticks and a widescreen television monitor, projecting multiple screen images of a forest block or mill yard.

That’s instead of having to commute every day some distance from home, maybe on icy, rainy or sketchy bush roads, to jump into the cab of your equipment that’s been sitting in the cold all night.

Now imagine that your place of work is Vancouver while the equipment you are operating is situated somewhere like Manitoba, South Carolina or Brazil.

This is where forest equipment operation may be headed, addressing all sorts of workplace and staffing challenges currently facing the industry, such as widening the labour pool by extending the potential employment longevity of valued experienced operators—as well as opening up new employment opportunities for women and disabled people as equipment operators, because of this revolutionary change in the work environment.

And given the amount of logging now using tethered systems for work on steep slopes, not having an operator physically in the cab of, for example, a tethered skidder offers a significant safety benefit.

Two North American companies have already commercialized remote piloting technology for heavy equipment commonly used in the forest industry. One technology provider, Kodama Systems, is strictly focused on forestry and is working at the present time with heavy equipment manufacturer, Weiler Forestry. They have installed and proven their Kodama Autopilot machine teleoperation platform in an Weiler Forestry S340 skidder.

Another technology provider is Teleo Inc, with its autopilot system installed in a Volvo L350F wheel loader working for a logging contractor in Finland, as well as in three Cat wheel loaders working at a paper mill in Florida owned by RYAM, to haul bark and wood chips 24/7 at its pulp mill in Fernandia Beach.

Teleo has gone a step further by including robotics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning within their system so that the wheel loader can travel autonomously from point to point under the watchful eye of a human operator sitting in a control room, providing the opportunity for the operator to control or monitor multiple pieces of equipment at one time.

“The point to point autonomy part delivers immediate payback to contractors in all industries right away,” says Mark Piotto, Vice-President of Sales at Teleo Inc. He lives near Kelowna, B.C. He adds that based on their calculations, the system should pay back in efficiency gains in less than a year.

Both Kodama Systems and Teleo are headquartered in California.

The bottom line is that this technology is available now, inserting the latest remote piloting and autonomous driving technology into the regular workflow of repetitive equipment functions within the forestry sector, work which is now being handled by human operators in the equipment cab. The question now is if and how quickly this game-changing technology will catch on.

In the case of Kodama Systems, with its equipment working in an actual forest block, the availability now of the Starlink satellite network is allowing for communication between the operator and equipment within fractions of a second.

Pat Weiler, CEO of Weiler Forestry based in LaGrange, Georgia, says that the technology is at the “show me” stage, where it will be up to equipment manufacturers like his and technology partners to demonstrate and prove to loggers and forest companies that there is a noticeable cost benefit from adopting this advanced equipment operation technology.

“I was a little skeptical that we could get people to engage, but I have been very impressed with how quickly loggers have embraced the concept of having semi-autonomous or autonomous skidders,” he says. “Once it has been proposed to them, they are now leaning into it fairly aggressively and now are asking me about it quite a bit.

“It certainly will reduce costs over time with more consistent and controlled use of the equipment, it is certainly safer, and it certainly is going to be a better environment for the operator,” he said.

At the moment, Weiler Forestry is primarily focused on remote piloting with partner, Kodama Systems, to make its Autopilot system available within its line of forestry equipment. A demonstration of the technology working within Weiler’s S340 skidder was unveiled at the American Loggers Council conference last fall, and is being offered to customers in 2025.

Although Kodama’s system is capable of autonomous functions, company CEO Merritt Jenkins says that those functions such as enabling the skidder to autonomously drive itself from point to point are still in the development stage.

He adds that the company has focused exclusively on forestry because of the perceived need.

“This is an industry that hasn’t seen a lot of attention from the communities of robotics, AI, and computer vision and there are really significant labour challenges that the logging community is facing,” he says. “You have long commutes, dangerous work, and challenges attracting younger employees. So we see this as a really attractive industry where there is a really significant need to build out teleoperation and autonomy of heavy equipment.”

He identifies four technological advances that have occurred over the past decade to make this opportunity to revolutionize equipment operation in forestry possible.

These are satellite connectivity and specifically Elon Musk’s Starlink network. In that case, it allows for remote operation of equipment where there is no cellular service and the operator can be located anywhere in the world.

Three Cat loaders working in a RYAM pulp and paper yard in Florida utilize Teleo remote piloting technology, and deliver bark autonomously for use in energy production 24/7.

The second advance is the development within forestry equipment of drive-by-wire systems. This is the use of electronics or electro-mechanical systems in place of mechanical systems to control driving functions, making integration of autopiloting and autonomy components much simpler.

The third advance is growth of computing capacity in relation to computing cost. There has been a huge reduction in computing costs over the past decade.

The fourth advance is a reduction in the cost of sensors.

“As we have seen a scale-up of autonomous vehicles, we have seen a reduction in the cost of sensors,” says Jenkins.

He describes Kodama System’s Autopilot “as really a simple system in terms of hardware. It’s a computer, cameras and the associated networking to be able to stream all of those video feeds.”

Their system installed in the Weiler Forestry S340 skidder has been working in a thinning application of mixed conifers in relatively steep slopes in northern California for the past year-and-a-half to stress-test and demonstrate that its Autopilot will work as advertised. The skidder is now working in a salvage logging environment. Their camera selection has allowed them to work day and night by exploiting the illumination provided by lights on the machine.

They can integrate their Autopilot system into any forestry machine with their focus on skidders and especially Weiler Forestry equipment products for now, given the support that Weiler has demonstrated for their product. But Jenkins adds that the system is not specific to Weiler’s line of equipment and that they are open to working with any forest equipment manufacturer, as they want to make their Autopilot available throughout North America.

“We see Canada as a really attractive opportunity, especially in northern Canada where workforce capacity challenges are really extreme,” says Jenkins, and according to Weiler, their stance is that they don’t want to limit great technology from other people being able to use it.

Kodama Systems plans to expand the offering of its remote Autopilot system to all logging equipment manufacturers.

Teleo has experience creating autonomous construction equipment such as bulldozers, wheel loaders, and articulated dump trucks. Last fall, they announced that they have included logging as part of their strategic focus by partnering with Fin-Terpuu Oy, one of Europe’s largest logging companies.

They have equipped a Volvo L350F wheel loader owned by the logging company to autonomously transport logs from their arrival point to a processing yard, hailing what they say is “the world’s first logging yard with autonomous operations.”

Using Teleo technology, this Volvo loader at a Finnish forestry operation is traveling autonomously from where an operator unloaded a truck to the point where the logs will be deposited in a deck, handled by the remote operator. This represents, says Teleo, “the world’s first logging yard with autonomous operations”.

Teleo says that it can convert any make, model and vintage of heavy equipment into “autonomous robots”. Its Supervised Autonomy keeps human operators involved, where one human oversees multiple autonomous machines at once. The human operator acts as the supervisor, with the ability to step in remotely to control the machine if needed.

Teleo’s Mark Piotto says that their system is largely identical for use in a variety of heavy equipment.

“We thought we would be focusing in mining and construction, but the second we did a wheel loader, that opened up a number of industries—logging, pulp and paper mills and forestry for sure,” he says. “A wheel loader is the Swiss army knife of machines.”

Teleo provides what it calls a mesh communication network, which is a group of connectivity devices such as Wi-Fi routers, to act as a single network, that is dedicated to the work site to provide the linkage between the operator and the equipment. Operators can log into the mesh network through an Internet connection and work from thousands of kilometres away from the work site. The company is currently evaluating satellite connectivity.

Initially, the operator will set a path for the wheel loader or forklift to take. In the case of their Finnish client, the operator is still fully engaged remotely with the function of unloading the logs from trucks and placing them in the processing yard. But the task of travelling from the unloading point to the log placement point is autonomous, though monitored, allowing the operator to control several wheel loaders or other equipment such as forklifts at one time.

Throughout this repetitive process, Teleo and its AI and machine learning technology is in fact learning, so that over time, it will be possible to include more complex autonomous functions.

“Teleo is learning every time that operator is interacting with that machine,” Piotto says, “creating our own library, allowing us to inject more autonomy into the application.”

So, for example, it will be possible to teach the wheel loader eventually how to safely unload the logs from the truck and place the logs in the processing yard, in addition to travelling from point to point and then returning.

But he adds that it will take a while before their system would go to work remotely or autonomously in a feller buncher because of the remoteness and complexity of that machine’s functions.

“We’re not there yet,” he says, but as far as heavy equipment being operated remotely and engaged in repetitive tasks such as transporting materials autonomously, they’re open for business and there is a lot of interest to take it further. They are listening.