This project is a culmination of one years research tackling the timber industry: with drone research management and robotic fabrication. Our research tries to value a tree at its real worth to render our current understanding of the forest and of wood fabrication more thoughtful and efficient. we have explore forest surveying both above and sub canopy with a low cost monocular drone, demonstrating our abilities to provide a more accurate and more cost effective alternative than current forest surveying methods. In order to understand the data that can be collected from the forest we developed a database to facilitate its management. At this time we have focused on the tree geometries as we see it has more immediate impact on forestry timber yields, however the database structure can grow to encompass all aspects of the forest. Further more we have developed a robotic bandsaw and a process to cut along wood grain to preserve the woods natural strength. We have demonstrated a possibility among many of the possible applications of natural sawn curved wood in the architectural context. We acknowledge however that this presents a very narrow image of the impact or possibilities these technologies have to offer.

 

focus on the single tree in context of its surroundings

 

current forest surveying methods

curved trees for rectilinear construction

 

data extracted from forest

 

SLAM and sub canopy drone navigation

drone navigation workflow

realtime monocular depth segmentation