Augmented reality, which superimposes digital information on the ‘real’ world, can be used to guide machinery maintenance processes on site to improve forest crew safety and harvesting productivity.
A safer workplace is a priority for the forestry industry. Not all incidents are related to actual harvesting. Between 2015 and 2019, nearly 500 harvesting maintenance work-related incidents were recorded.
Scion has been working for two years with harvest equipment manufacturer Waratah and digital tech developer StaplesVR to create a practical solution. Augmented reality has been incorporated into an in-field servicing tool. The application provides step-by-step maintenance instructions in real time to guide people onsite conducting repairs on a Waratah 622B Harvester Head.
Scion’s industry partner, Waratah, provided detailed schematics and expert engineering interviews of the Harvester Head, along with the parts catalogue, operator manual and standard operating procedures for daily maintenance tasks. From this, StaplesVR created an application that includes safety modules, a fault reporting module, detailed visualisation of maintenance and service tasks, highlighted machine subsystems and an updated user interface.
We expect this application to markedly improve the productivity by minimising downtime and the potential for accidents during onsite maintenance by crews. Currently, forestry crews have limited onsite support/knowledge to carry out daily checks and routine maintenance. The augmented reality solution offers opportunities to bridge these knowledge gaps in a reasonable and realistic timeframe. We can also overlay safety information, implicitly teaching operators to take care of themselves and eliminating maintenance injuries as a result of limited understanding of machinery. Timely maintenance has the potential to eliminate unnecessary service expenditure and product malfunction, saving all industry stakeholders money and time.
The need for safer machinery maintenance solutions such as this will continue to grow as the level of mechanisation in forestry increases. With marked improvements in cost, application and content quality, there are numerous uses for augmented reality beyond maintenance service and support including manufacturing and marketing/education.
“The ability to work directly with the industry problem solvers Scion and the industry experts Warratah is an incredibly powerful tool to be able to create meaningful content.” - Krystal Paraone, Game Developer & Studio Manager, StaplesVR
Funders: Waratah (in-kind), Forest Growers Research, New Zealand Forest Growers Levy Trust Inc and Ministry for Primary Indusries
Collaborators: Forest Growers Research, StaplesVR, Waratah Ltd
