Funding roundBrief
Kodama raises 7 million dollars to remotely drive the machines that drag logs out of the forest
US start-up Kodama Systems, based in Sonora, California, has raised new funds to deploy its remotely operated skidders in forests in the south-east of the United States, Korean site Robot Newspaper reports.
According to the site, machines fitted with Kodama's technology have moved more than one hundred thousand tonnes of timber in 6 months, on logging sites spread across several states.
The system combines remote driving with supervised autonomous driving. The machine repeats simple tasks, and an experienced operator takes over remotely in complex or unexpected situations. For now, the company equips skidders, the machines with a large grapple that drag felled trees to the trucks.
Merritt Jenkins, Kodama's co-founder and CEO, says the trade struggles to keep its operators. Some logging contractors the company has met have changed skidder operator 8 times in a year, he says.
According to its CEO, each day of remote driving produces about 1 terabyte of data used to train the system.
The 7 million dollar round is reported by The Robot Report, which Robot Newspaper cites. The company says it intends to use the money for commercial deployments, partnerships with machine manufacturers and the development of supervised autonomous driving.
Source
- 로봇신문 Robot Newspaper · irobotnews.com
