Forest Harvester: From Axes to Remote Control and ABB

A forest harvester is a wheeled or tracked machine that fells a tree with a head on the end of its crane, strips off the branches and cuts the trunk into measured logs, all run by one operator in the cab. In the Nordic cut-to-length method it works alongside a forwarder that carries the logs to the roadside. This post starts with axes and crosscut saws and follows the chainsaw to the first Finnish harvesters. Then it looks at a hard October for forest machine makers, a startup that runs logging machines from home offices, and where ABB robots could fit.

A Ponsse King Scorpion harvester at work in the Bruderwald forest in Bamberg, Germany, 2024. Photo: Reinhold Möller (Ermell) / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How felling went from axes to harvester heads

Before chainsaws, trees were cut down by hand. Until about 1880, long crosscut saws were mainly used for bucking, cutting fallen trees into lengths, while the trees themselves were felled with axes. Loggers in Pennsylvania started felling with saws around 1880. Two-man felling saws had a concave back so that wedges could be driven in behind the blade to stop the cut from closing on it, and fellers working on big trees stood on springboards to keep the saw at the right angle. Crosscut saws are still in wide use around the world, despite the chainsaw.

Three loggers with axes and a long crosscut saw at a big tree, from the Gerald W. Williams Collection. Photo: OSU Special Collections & Archives via Wikimedia Commons (no known restrictions)

Powered saws came next. Andreas Stihl patented an electric chainsaw for log bucking sites in 1926 and a petrol model in 1929, and in 1927 Emil Lerp, the founder of Dolmar, developed a petrol chainsaw that took two men to run. Early chainsaws were heavy two-person machines with long bars. The first one-man chainsaw appeared in 1950, still heavy, and by 1959 the average saw weighed about 12 kg. The feller still worked at the foot of the tree, exposed to kickback, timber that moves before the cut is complete, noise, and the vibration that commonly caused white finger before saws had vibration damping.

Two timber workers with a Wade saw, a motorised crosscut saw, at the Ellis & Burnand sawmill in Mangapehi, New Zealand, 1920. Photo: Albert Percy Godber via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Finland and Sweden mechanised the rest of the job. Finnish engineer Sakari Pinomäki's company PIKA introduced the first fully mobile harvester, the PIKA model 75, in 1973, and Swedish firm SP Maskiner brought out the first single-grip harvester head in the early 1980s. Ponsse was founded in Vieremä in 1970 by forest machine entrepreneur Einari Vidgrén, after the municipal council approved building him a factory hall by a majority of one vote. It began making grapple harvesters in 1985, developed its H 60 head at the end of that year, and in 1986 delivered its first machine with a working diameter measuring device to contractor Voitto Muikku in Puolanka.

A Ponsse H 60 harvester head on display at the Ottoneum museum in Kassel. Photo: Kritzolina / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Harvesters in 2026: smarter cranes and a weak market

On 20 October Ponsse opened change negotiations covering all 1,109 of its employees in Finland. It said its order books were too low for its production capacity and its profitability had weakened, and it is preparing for possible temporary layoffs of up to 90 days in 2027, with no redundancies. Its machines work by the cut-to-length method. The harvester fells, delimbs and measures each trunk and cuts it into the assortments a mill has ordered, such as sawlogs, veneer logs and pulpwood, and the forwarder carries them out to the roadside. Ponsse says this takes two machines where tree-length logging needs three or four.

A Ponsse Ergo harvester in the Bruderwald in Bamberg, 2023. Photo: Ermell / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

A modern harvester head holds a hydraulic chainsaw, curved delimbing knives, two feed rollers, diameter sensors and a measuring wheel, and software combines those readings with the mill's price list to choose the most valuable cuts. At FinnMetko in September, Ponsse showed a new H6 head with a new measuring wheel for more accurate length readings and an optional rotator that turns it continuously through 360 degrees. Its Opti 5G system now passes production volumes and map routes from harvester to forwarder automatically. Komatsu Forest's Smart Crane runs the telescopic function by itself, so the crane moves as one unit and the operator simply steers the head.

A Komatsu C93 harvester head in Muuratsalo, Jyväskylä, Finland, 2020. Photo: Antti Leppänen / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

We found no ABB robot in a harvester or in forest machine production, so what follows is a possibility for the factories that build the machines. Ponsse's Vieremä plant already has an automated warehouse with 15,500 slots for small parts and 3,900 pallet positions, and automated guided vehicles bring parts to the assembly line. Its machines also vary a lot from customer to customer. ABB aims its GoFa cobot welding package at high-mix, low-volume work, with an Easy Teach Device for teaching welds by hand and a reach of up to 1.62 m. For heavier parts, ABB's IRB 6710 to IRB 6740 robots carry 150 to 310 kg and reach 2.5 to 3.2 m.

An engineer with a FlexPendant beside one of ABB's IRB 6710 to IRB 6740 large robots. Photo: ABB

Remote logging and the people who still run the machines

Remote control has reached skidders, the machines that drag logs out of the forest. On 19 October California startup Kodama announced a $7 million seed round, bringing its total funding to $14 million. Its kit takes one to one and a half days to fit to a skidder and combines eight cameras, two LiDAR sensors, Starlink and GPS with NVIDIA computers. Operators work from home: the machine handles repeatable tasks under supervision, and a person takes over for complex work. CEO Merritt Jenkins told AgFunderNews that machines with the system moved more than 100,000 tons of timber in the US Southeast in six months and matched the hourly productivity of manual machines.

A grapple skidder carries logs during a timber sale in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests, Arizona, 2018. Photo: USDA Forest Service via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Jenkins puts labour reliability first. One logger Kodama works with went through eight skidder operators in a year, and crew members might leave home at four in the morning to reach a site. The company now wants its machines to run 20 hours a day, with one operator controlling several, but it is not aiming for full autonomy from day one. The machines still need people on site to refuel and grease them. Forest thinning is also demanding work: Lars Svensson, CEO of Nordic Forestry Automation, said in 2023 that its cognitive load is comparable to a fighter pilot's. Manual chainsaw felling remains common on very steep slopes and for removing single trees.

A worker guides an ABB GoFa cobot fitted with a welding torch over a fixture table. Photo: ABB

A Gottstein Fellowship report by Damien Petfield of Forestry Corporation of NSW, covered by Wood Central on 2 October, says output can vary by 40 percent between an average and a top harvester operator. Australian contractors told his survey that training each entry-level recruit costs $40,000 to $60,000. Finland's Valtimo college trains 250 students a year on 25 simulators and 30 machines, and John Deere told Petfield that 10 days on its TimberSkills simulator can take a trainee to level three of five. Kodama says it can train a remote operator in about a day or two. Our posts on tree planting and sawmill automation cover the steps before and after the harvester.

An engineer uses a tablet next to an ABB robot from the IRB 6710 to IRB 6740 range. Photo: ABB

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