Robotics in Forest Inventories: SPOT's First Steps

In the context of the potential future use of unmanned ground vehicles for forestinventories, we present the first experiences with SPOT, a legged robot equipped with a LiDARinstrument and several cameras that have been used with a teleoperation approach for single-treedetection and measurements. This first test was carried out using the default LiDAR system (the socalled enhanced autonomy payload - EAP, installed on the board of SPOT to guide autonomousmovements) to understand advantages and limitations of this platform to support forest inventoryactivities. The test was carried out in the Vallombrosa forest (Italy) by assessing different dataacquisition methods. The first results showed that EAP LiDAR generated noisy point clouds whereonly large trees (DBH >= 20 cm) could be identified. The results showed that the accuracy in treeidentification and DBH measurements were strongly influenced by the path used for dataacquisition, with average errors in tree positioning no less than 1.9 m. Despite this, the best methodsallowed the correct identification of 97% of large trees.