The Ponsse Scorpion is an eight-wheeled wood harvester designed to work in rugged forest terrain. The machine’s distinctive frame consists of three segments linked by joints that rotate by as much as 12%. This frame enables the cabin on the center segment to remain level while the wheeled front and rear segments adjust to changes in the terrain. Hydraulic leveling controls keep the center segment stable even on uneven ground.
By developing the harvester’s control software using Model-Based Design with MATLAB® and Simulink®, Ponsse engineers halved their development time and improved code quality.
“Rapid prototyping with Model-Based Design sped up our design process, leading to shorter development times and reduced development costs,” says Juha Inberg, director, technology and R&D at Ponsse. “The embedded code we generated from our Simulink model is quite reliable, and it is free of the programming errors that we used to encounter when we wrote the C code by hand.”