TWAIN HARTE, Calif. -This is the conflagration of the Sierra Nevada. The air shimmers over dead branches covered in paint as it is early June, and the temperature is 97 degree Celsius. Lots of waste wood that is not worth bringing to a mill are found along logging roads in the Stanislaus National Forest, past 20-foot-tall fire mounds and pines and ponderosa trees. Workers on the front range of fighting forest fires have created them: a tech startup that tries to simplify the huge machines the team relies on, and a timber crew who thinning these forests for the Forest Service.
They are called skidders: 10-foot-tall cars on four huge tires, with a bulldozerlike edge on the front and a tree-size struggle dangling from the rear. They are the worker ants that transport broken files from the jungle to landing websites where they are delimbed and loaded onto trucks headed for the mill. Typically, a single pilot operates them for a 12-hour change, grabbing reports from behind and subsequently driving forward.
Specialists at the Sonora, California, business Kodama Systems, a forest management firm, have hacked into a wagon built by Caterpillar, studded it with camcorders and sensor, and plugged it into the computer. The end result is a remote-controlled system that does scut function for a forest crew and learns to perform semiautonomously by using lidar, or light detection and ranging, to map the forest.
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