Demolition Robot Product

Overview

A demolition robot is a compact tracked carrier, operated entirely by radio remote, built to do heavy demolition where a person in a cab cannot or should not be: under slabs being broken from above, inside furnaces and kilns still radiating heat, on floors of uncertain capacity, in tunnels, and in rooms reached only through a standard doorway. The type was pioneered by Brokk in Sweden in 1976 and the layout has been stable since: a narrow Tracked Undercarriage, four Outrigger System, a 360° Slewing Turret, and a distinctive three-part Three-Part Arm that carries a hydraulic tool. Most machines are electric, fed by a trailing cable, which is what allows indoor work without ventilation.

The defining trick is power density. Because the operator stands clear, the machine needs no cab, no operator protection structure and no comfort systems, and because it plants outriggers before working, it needs far less dead weight for stability. A 2-tonne robot therefore swings a breaker that would otherwise demand a 5-tonne excavator, while still passing through a 780 mm doorway and riding a standard passenger elevator.

Carrier and stability

The Track Chassis rides on steel-corded Rubber Track bands driven by planetary Travel Drive motors at walking pace, climbing stairs up to about 30°. Work, however, happens on the outriggers, not the tracks. Each articulated Outrigger Leg is positioned individually by its Outrigger Cylinder, so the machine can plant its Outrigger Pad feet on a staircase, a rubble pile or beside a wall and still form a wide, level support polygon. Load-holding valves lock the legs hydraulically; per-leg pressure sensing warns the operator when a foot is unloading, the precursor to a tip-over.

Above the chassis, the Slew Ring and Slew Drive give the Turret Frame continuous rotation, with a Counterweight balancing the arm. The arm itself has three pinned sections — First Boom, Second Boom and the Dipper Arm — one joint more than an excavator. The extra articulation lets the tool work vertically down at the machine's own tracks, straight up against a ceiling, and horizontally through a wall opening, all without repositioning; cylinders carry burst-protection valves so a cut hose cannot drop the arm.

Power and hydraulics

Instead of a diesel, the Pump Motor — a 15–30 kW three-phase motor fed through the Power Inlet and a Motor Starter that tames inrush for ordinary site distribution — drives a load-sensing Main Pump at around 250 bar. The Valve Block meters flow to travel, slew, arm and tool circuits under command of the Machine ECU. Electric drive produces no exhaust, much less noise and far less heat than a diesel, but continuous breaker duty still loads the oil hard, so a fan-blown Oil Cooler is sized for full-duty operation inside hot structures. Diesel power packs exist for outdoor and cable-impractical sites.

Tools mount on the Tool Bracket and feed from the dedicated Auxiliary Circuit, which delivers essentially the whole pump output to the attachment — the reason these small carriers run disproportionately large breakers. Flat-face Quick Coupling fittings make tool swaps a minutes-long job: hydraulic breakers for concrete and rock, crusher jaws for rebar-laden structures and low-vibration "munching" demolition, grapples for sorting, drum cutters for tunnels and refractory, and buckets for mucking out.

Remote operation

The operator wears the Remote Console on a harness and works from wherever visibility and safety are best, typically 5–100 m away. Two proportional Proportional Joystick units map to arm, slew, travel and outrigger functions by mode; the Radio Link is a frequency-hopping modem with a watchdog that freezes all motion within tenths of a second of signal loss, and a cable connection substitutes inside shielded vessels. The Remote E-Stop cuts power over a monitored safety channel independent of the normal command path. Removing the operator from the machine is the entire safety case: falling debris, silica dust at the breaking face, heat and collapse risk all land on the robot, not a person.

Applications

The classic markets are top-down concrete demolition, cement and steel plant refractory tear-out (where machines work inside kilns at temperatures no cab could tolerate), nuclear decommissioning with shielded or sacrificial machines, tunnel scaling, and selective interior strip-out in occupied buildings where a diesel excavator is impossible. Fleet sizing follows building access: the most popular classes are exactly those that fit through doorways (around 780 mm) and inside elevators (around 1–2 t), because getting to the work, not raw breaking power, is usually the binding constraint.