Kodama筹集了7M美元 将机器人带到林业

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Kodama initially focused on wildfire risk reduction in the western U.S., but it is now focusing on the timber industry in the southeastern U.S. | Source: Kodama Kodama Systems today said it has raised $7 million to bring physical AI to forestry. The company said it will use the latest funding to support commercial deployments, deepen OEM partnerships, and continue development of supervised autonomy capabilities for complex off-road environments. “Right now, we’re working with different forestry companies across the southeastern U.S,” Ben Pinfield, a go-to-market associate at Kodama, told The Robot Report . “We’re at a point where we’re scaling, integrating into new machine types, and developing more autonomy capabilities in forestry .” Kodama’s technology is already deployed in commercial logging operations across the southeastern U.S. Over the past six months, machines equipped with the company’s technology have moved more than 100,000 tons of timber across multiple states. “We’re focused on specifically plantation timber operations,” said Merritt Jenkins, co-founder and CEO of Kodama. “If we look more broadly, though, this is a tool for land management, and this is absolutely a tool that will be used in wildfire mitigation, from a forest thinning perspective, as well as wildfire suppression.” Including the latest funding, Kodama has raised a total of $14 million to date. Konvoy Ventures and Breakwater Ventures co-led the round. The round also included participation from Blue Forest Asset Management, NYA Ventures, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Congruent Ventures, Dangerous Ventures, M1C, and others. Forest contractors are facing a lot of challenges. Demand for timber, forest management, and wildfire-resilience work is rising, but each requires long hours at remote job sites. “If you’re a 20-something-year-old prospective logger thinking about entering the industry, you need to be on-site at 5:30 a.m., which means you’re usually leaving your home at like 4:00 or 4:30 in the morning,” Jenkins said. “Then, you’re in a machine for nine or 10 hours a day, driving over stumps and rocks and through ruts, beating up your body all day long. There are some loggers that we’ve spoken with who have gone through, for example, eight skidder operators in a year. It’s brutal turnover in this industry for this type of operator.” As fewer people go into the industry and more operators retire, it’s getting harder and harder to find experienced, reliable operators, and fewer people want to get into the industry. “For the heavy equipment operations, that [work] can be pretty rough on their bodies,” Pinfield said. “It’s like the bang just isn’t worth the buck as far as the physical trade-off for a lot of these operators. So, our customers are having a hard time hiring talent. Even when they are able to hire talent, a lot of times, it’s unreliable.” Kodama says its technology is currently running 10 to 14 hours a day on work sites. | Source: Kodama Kodama combines supervised autonomy with teleoperation , enabling machines to handle repeatable tasks while experienced operators remotely manage complex work and edge cases. The Sonora, Calif.-based company said this hybrid approach amplifies the capabilities of skilled operators and improves machine utilization. Kodama said it is currently working with skidders on logging sites. “When a group of trees are cut down, a skidder with a big claw called the grapple picks them up, and drags them to the landing where they are then loaded into trucks. It’s essentially moving these trees from one place to another,” Pinfield explained. “The ultimate goal is also working on the other machines that are in those fleets, which are the cutter and the loader.” Kodama said as it deploys more machines, its data advantage compounds through a continuous learning loop across equipment, operators, worksites, and forestry workflows. “Every day that we remotely operate the machine, we’re generating about a teraby