A$1.5m AFWI funding to advance autonomous forestry machineryFriday 20 Feb 2026
The project, titled SilvaNaut: Incorporating Autonomous Operation into Australian Forest Machinery – Robotic Weed Control Conditions, directly supports AFWI’s theme of making the most of our available wood fibre by enabling safer, more efficient and higher-yield forest operations. SilvaNaut will develop and field-test ‘The Autonomous Forest Navigator,’ a bolt-on autonomous navigation module that retrofits existing forestry machinery to operate hands-free between plantation rows. Designed initially for young (0-3 years old), open-canopy plantations, the system will replace manual joystick control with precise autonomous navigation capable of operating in rough, real-world forest terrain. Project Lead Daryl Killin said the core challenge the project addresses is safe, reliable navigation in environments that are far more complex than agricultural settings. The project will be delivered through Daryl’s company, Native Conifers Carbon Sink, who registered the first tree planting project for carbon credits in Australia under the Carbon Farming Initiative in December 2012. The company has been exploring remote-controlled weed control for a decade. “There’s a real need for an autonomous vehicle that can do weed control in place of humans or human-driven machinery... but unlike driverless cars or broad-acre agriculture, we’re talking about remote locations, uneven ground, harvest residue, and a very high need for precision, because if you spray the wrong chemical in the wrong place, you can kill the tree,” Daryl said. The technology integrates high-resolution Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), LiDAR, inertial sensors (IMU), and AI-based obstacle detection, building on proven control technology developed by project partners. This geospatial backbone will enable not only robotic weed control, but also future applications such as inventory assessment, fire management, and forest monitoring. Australia’s forestry sector is under growing pressure from labour shortages, rising operational costs, safety risks, and increasingly stringent environmental expectations. Daryl said manual weed control is labour-intensive and often undertaken in hazardous conditions, particularly in the early years of plantation establishment. “Not many people want to put on a knapsack and work in remote areas with snakes, spiders and rough terrain anymore," he says, "And even when people are available, you’re limited by human constraints; you can’t work at night, reliability varies, and safety risks are always present.” The Autonomous Forest Navigator removes operators from high-risk terrain while improving consistency and efficiency. Importantly, it enables round-the-clock operation, allowing growers to target optimal spraying windows that are often missed under current manual systems. “Weeds in the first two years are critical,” Daryl said. “If you lose 200 trees out of 1,000 per hectare early on, you’ve lost future options for wood volume, and you can’t put those trees back later. That loss shows up 25 or 30 years down the track, right when the return on investment really matters.” While automation is well advanced in agriculture, Daryl said many existing solutions are over-engineered, too costly, or poorly suited to forestry conditions. More >> Source & image credit: University of the Sunshine Coast | ||
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