40 years of mobile experience
Demonstration with the Girondin ALLIANCE FORÊTS BOIS Group.
Spotlight on the ALLIANCE FORÊTS BOIS Group:
Cooperative with 500 employees, working for 44,000 forest owners and members, with a network of 14 local offices in Aquitaine, Midi-Pyrénées, Poitou-Charentes, Limousin and Languedoc-Roussillon.
It operates in three main fields:
- consultancy services to support foresters in the management and operation of their forests,
- forestry: planting, maintaining, enhancing, etc.
- exploitation and sale of wood
A word from Mr Loïc Cotten, Director of the Development Service:
“Innovation is an ongoing desire for our Group, guaranteeing prices and optimised production profitability. With this in mind, ALLIANCE FORETS BOIS works with HYD&AU FLUID to design an automatic, driverless poplar planting machine that uses GPS. The purpose of this machine is to provide an all-in-one solution for work that currently involves 4 major stages: manual ground staking – mechanical ploughing – second manual staking – use of the auger.
We appreciate the responsiveness and availability of HYD&AU FLUID, and its ability to take a stand on different technologies. »
Born out of discussions within a working group, the prototype currently being developed brings together several skills, those of HYD&AU FLUID to supply the hydraulic solution, but also those of RHOBAN SYSTEM for the automation and GPS guidance part, a design office specialising in mechanical engineering, ID-TECHNOLOGIES, and LANDAISE BORDEAUX INDUSTRIE, a Landes manufacturer of ploughs and rollers.
The HYD&AU solution:
The planting machine consists of 2 sub-assemblies:
- the auger at the front of the tractor
- the planter hitched onto the 3 points at the rear of the tractor
The auger is special in that it is fully servo-controlled. Indeed, the actuators are instrumented (linear and pressure sensors) so that their transfers can be controlled and their movements servo-controlled in relation to one another.
The planter has a 3-axis table with linear sensors that use the built-in GPS to position the poplar tree to the nearest centimetre.
The tractor is GPS-guided and does not therefore need a driver.
By relying on the synergy of skills within the HYD&AU Group, HYD&AU FLUID has supplied the whole automation assembly for this machine:
- hydraulic components
- VERAFLEX cylinders
- electrical boxes and wiring from SAMELEC
- tractor programming and guidance by RHOBAN
