TWAIN HARTE, Calif. -This is the tinderbox of the Sierra Nevada. It’s early June, the temperature is 97 degrees Fahrenheit and the air shimmers over dead trees choked in brush. In the Stanislaus National Forest, logging roads wind through firs and ponderosa pines, past 20-foot-tall burn piles — tons of scrap wood not worth bringing to a sawmill. They’ve been assembled by workers on the front line of the fight against forest fires: a timber crew thinning these woods for the Forest Service and a tech startup that’s trying to automate the enormous machines the crew relies on.
They are called skidders: 10-foot-tall vehicles on four massive wheels, with a bulldozerlike blade on the front and a tree-size grapple dangling from the back. They are the worker bees, hauling downed logs from the forest to landing sites, where they are delimbed and loaded onto trucks bound for the sawmill. Usually, a single driver operates them for a 12-hour shift, grabbing logs from behind and then driving forward.
Engineers at the Sonora, California, startup Kodama Systems, a forest management company, have hacked into a skidder built by Caterpillar, studded it with cameras and radar, and plugged it into the internet. The result is a remote-controlled machine that does scut work for a timber crew and teaches itself to operate semiautonomously, using lidar — or light detection and ranging — to map the forest.
