Artificial intelligence will decide which panels get repaired at both of Arauco’s Chilean plywood mills, with cameras and 3D scanners set to read every board as it moves down the repair lines at plants that turn out up to 800,000 cubic metres of plywood a year. That is according to Raute, the Finnish group behind the technology, which confirmed in June that its Visual Analyzer R7 systems will sit over the panel repairing lines at both mills.
The order pushes the technology deeper into a sector where Goldman Sachs research already counts 28 per cent of jobs across farming, fishing, and forestry in the path of automation, above the 25 per cent average for all industries. Most of AI’s early timber work sat out in the forest, counting trees and hunting bark beetles, and the deal at Arauco puts it squarely on the mill floor.
Behind the order is the biggest plywood producer in Latin America, with two production lines at each of Arauco’s Chilean plants, and AraucoPly panels stamped to the AS/NZS 2269 structural standard heading into Australia and New Zealand.
“We aim to improve the performance of our panel repairing process,” Aldo Lopez, Operations Manager at Maderas Arauco, said of an investment that hangs 3D scanners and high-resolution colour cameras over every panel on the line. Raute claims the Visual Analyzer R7 measures each flaw before a repair head moves, trimming repair material use by up to 50 per cent.
It comes as Raute told the industry in June that the deep learning behind its analysers had moved into commercial veneer, plywood, and LVL mills, the payoff from more than five decades of building grading systems across 50+ wood species. Each sheet now gets its own defect map, letting mills grade, clip, and route material before a bad peel reaches the drying kilns and hot presses.
“Mistakes made early in the process become increasingly costly later on,” Markus Sirviö, the senior director running Raute’s analyser business, said of logs and veneer that vary more than they used to as mills work through a wider mix of species. Catch the flaw at the peeler, Sirviö’s argument runs, and it never gets baked into a finished panel.
Wood Central understands the two companies go back more than two decades: Raute was the main supplier for Arauco’s greenfield Itata plywood plant at Nueva Aldea in 2003, a delivery that already included the Mecano defect analyser, today’s system descends from.
Arauco is not even the first mill group to hand grading to the machines, after Sweden’s Södra rolled out the world’s first AI-driven strength grader at its Värö sawmill, a MiCROTEC unit built to read up to 240 boards a minute.
For Raute, the deal brightens a bleak run of numbers, with the Lahti-based group guiding 2026 net sales of €135 million to €170 million, down from €175.5 million in 2025 and heading for a second straight year of falling sales. Deliveries are scheduled for late 2026, and once the cameras come online, the first eyes on every repaired panel at Arauco will belong to a machine.
