Tree Trimming Robot: From Climbers to ABB Arms

How the tree trimming robot follows climbing arborists and bucket trucks near power lines, from the Wildlands Buck to JR West's boom robot and where ABB fits.

INDUSTRIAL ROBOTICS

Chat With Robot

10/6/20265 min read

Trees and power lines have been at odds for as long as there have been overhead wires. Someone has to keep the branches back, and for most of the last century that meant a person with a saw high in the canopy, sometimes a few feet from a live conductor. A tree trimming robot would let that person stay on the ground. This post follows the job from climbing arborists to bucket trucks to the remote cutting machines now being tested near power lines, looks at a new climbing robot from Nevada County, California, and asks where ABB industrial robots could fit in.

Green Davey Tree truck with a raised yellow boom and a chipper beside trees and overhead wires
Green Davey Tree truck with a raised yellow boom and a chipper beside trees and overhead wires

A Davey Tree crew works from a bucket truck beside roadside wires, with a chipper and a Workers Ahead sign, in Superior Township, Michigan. Photo: Dwight Burdette / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

How arborists and line crews kept trees off the wires

Commercial tree care took shape around the turn of the twentieth century. The Davey Tree Expert Company dates its start to 1880, and Asplundh was founded in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, in 1928. Their crews went up trees with ropes, handsaws and climbing spurs. As electric and telephone lines spread through towns and along country roads, utilities started paying these crews to clear the wires, and line clearance grew into its own trade. It was slow, risky work. Up in the tree, a climber judged the weight of each limb and its distance from the conductor, and nobody was there to catch a mistake.

Black and white photo of a group of men in work clothes standing on a lawn in front of the Capitol dome
Black and white photo of a group of men in work clothes standing on a lawn in front of the Capitol dome

Tree surgeons pose on the lawn of the US Capitol in Washington, August 1925. Photo: National Photo Company Collection, Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The first big change came from a cherry orchard. In 1944 Jay Eitel, tired of moving a ladder all day, sketched a telescoping lift on a truck. He founded Telsta Corporation in Sunnyvale, California, in 1953, and in 1954 Southern California Edison, PG&E and Davey Tree Surgery ordered its truck mounted lifts. Bucket trucks and brush chippers spread through line clearance work in the late 1950s and 1960s. Climbers still went up where a truck could not reach, and the ANSI Z133 safety standard for tree care, first published in 1972, set rules for working near energized lines.

A climber roped to the top of a tall bare tree trunk beside a house, seen from below
A climber roped to the top of a tall bare tree trunk beside a house, seen from below

A tree climber on spurs and a rope at the top of a trunk being taken down in sections, 2023. Photo: Jason.durantreecare / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Machines that cut with nobody aloft came next. Jarraff Industries, founded in Minnesota in 1979, builds an all terrain tree trimmer with a large circular saw on an insulated fiberglass boom that reaches about 75 feet while the operator sits in a cab on the ground. Then on August 14, 2003, FirstEnergy transmission lines in northern Ohio sagged into overgrown trees and set off the blackout that left about 50 million people in the United States and Canada without power. Investigators named the failure to trim trees as one of the main causes, and NERC's FAC-003 vegetation standard became mandatory in 2007.

White utility truck with an extended boom and bucket reaching into a tree above a residential street
White utility truck with an extended boom and bucket reaching into a tree above a residential street

Workers trim a street tree from a truck mounted cherry picker while a colleague clears cut branches below, 2018. Photo: Grendelkhan / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Climbing robots and remote saws near power lines today

The latest news comes from the Sierra foothills. The Union reported on September 22, 2026 that Wildlands Robotics, a startup in Nevada City, has built a robot called the Buck. It climbs a trunk at about seven feet per second, removes limbs with a 10 horsepower chainsaw and can buck a tree in under five minutes. CEO Cordell Hollingsworth wants it to keep crews on the ground during hazardous removals near power lines, and to help clear wildfire fuel faster than hand crews can. Work began in August 2025. One prototype is in testing, and the company plans a seed round this winter.

Arborist in a red helmet and harness sitting in a tree fork with ropes and a tool bag
Arborist in a red helmet and harness sitting in a tree fork with ropes and a tool bag

A climbing arborist in a helmet and harness works from a fork high in a tree, the kind of job the Buck robot aims to take over. Photo: TreeMinion15 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Japan is heading the same way. Nikkei Asia wrote on September 4, 2026 that Japanese robots are leaving the factory floor for tree cutting and lab work, and pictured Nippon Signal's ZX-3 humanoid. West Japan Railway already runs a two armed machine from Nippon Signal and Jinki Ittai on a boom mounted to a rail vehicle. An operator in a VR headset drives it to prune branches with a chainsaw and paint structures up to 12 meters high. In China, utility crews use portable lasers from RedCoast Laser to burn branches and kites off lines from the ground.

A narrow gauge railway platform with a worker on a raised platform cutting branches of a large tree
A narrow gauge railway platform with a worker on a raised platform cutting branches of a large tree

A crew trims trees from an aerial platform beside the railway at Ballasalla station on the Isle of Man, 2026. Photo: Gareth James / Geograph via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

ABB does not sell a tree trimming robot, and we found no ABB project in vegetation management. Its robots do work with wood. ABB arms handle timber panels in robotic building cells such as AUAR's, and the IRB 6700, with payloads from 150 to 300 kg, turns up in cutting, grinding and heavy handling cells. A mobile tree cutter would need a strong arm carrying a saw, plus a controller such as OmniCore that stops motion when something goes wrong. Teams usually work out paths like these in RobotStudio before any blade spins.

A white ABB industrial robot arm lifting a wooden panel in a workshop with timber parts on carts
A white ABB industrial robot arm lifting a wooden panel in a workshop with timber parts on carts

An ABB robot handling a timber panel at AUAR's robotic building cell. Photo: ABB

Where robotic vegetation management goes next

For utilities, the next step is probably machines that a trained person supervises. The Buck, boom saws and lasers all still need someone to pick the cut and watch the line. Software that measures the gap between branch and conductor from lidar or camera images could tell that operator where to cut first. Two problems stay open. Cost is one, since a single prototype is a long way from a fleet. The other is proof that a machine can work safely around energized conductors in wind, rain and steep ground.

A white bucket truck with a worker in the raised bucket cutting tall trees beside a two lane road
A white bucket truck with a worker in the raised bucket cutting tall trees beside a two lane road

An Oregon Department of Transportation bucket truck trims trees along a highway, 2023. Photo: Oregon Department of Transportation / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Industrial robot makers could play a quieter part. Specialized trimmers are built in small numbers, and their booms, saw heads and frames are welded and machined in factories where robots like the IRB 6700 are common. ABB SafeMove limits a robot's speed and reach inside set zones, and a remote saw needs similar logic to keep its blade out of a no-go zone around a live wire. Nobody sells that combination today, though each part of it exists in some form.

A large white ABB robot on a long track printing concrete parts inside a factory shed
A large white ABB robot on a long track printing concrete parts inside a factory shed

Serendix's ABB IRB 6700 printing station parts for JR West in its factory. Photo: ABB

At home, tree work will stay with people for a while. Garden robots are getting arms, as our post on garden and lawn care robots shows, but pruning a mature oak over a roof or a service drop is a different job, and homeowners should still call a qualified arborist when branches touch wires. Over the next few years, expect climbers and line clearance crews to keep choosing the tree and the cut while robots go up the trunk or reach toward the wire. Read how ABB robots help build the grid itself in our switchgear post.

Two engineers with a laptop and a tablet in front of a white ABB robot in a lab
Two engineers with a laptop and a tablet in front of a white ABB robot in a lab

Engineers share a robot cell design through RobotStudio Cloud. Photo: ABB

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