Assessing Soil Ripping Depth for Precision Forestry with a Cost-Effective Contactless Sensing System

Forest soil ripping is a practice that involves revolving the soil in a forest area to prepare it for planting or sowing operations. Advanced sensing systems may help in this kind of forestry operation to assure ideal ripping depth and intensity, as these are important aspects that have potential to minimise the environmental impact of forest soil ripping. In this work, a cost-effective contactless system - capable of detecting and mapping soil ripping depth in real-time - was developed and tested in laboratory and in a realistic forest scenario. The proposed system integrates two single-point LiDARs and a GNSS sensor. To evaluate the system, ground-truth data was manually collected on the field during the operation of the machine with a ripping implement. The proposed solution was tested in real conditions, and the results showed that the ripping depth was estimated with minimal error. The accuracy and mapping ripping depth ability of the low-cost sensor justify their use to support improved soil preparation with machines or robots toward sustainable forest industry.