Skip to main content

Robots demolish a site deemed too hazardous for workers

demolition robot powerstation mg 0263
Image used with permission by copyright holder
Robots demolished a power station in the U.K. this week, but don’t worry, it wasn’t Skynet becoming self aware. The whole thing was planned, by humans.

While robots aren’t usually relied upon for demolition work, in this case the site had been deemed too hazardous for humans after four workers were tragically killed when one of the buildings partially collapsed. In the aftermath, a 160-foot exclusion zone was set up, with no people allowed to enter the site.

As a result, a plan was put in place to use robots for the task — ranging from a smaller robot weighing in the region of 88 pounds to super-heavy machines weighing 4 tons. For the first part of the work, two robots made by the Irish company Reamda, referred to as the Robot Reacher and R-Evolve, surveyed the site. This involved taking photos and video, as well as utilizing a 3D laser scanner to study the six support columns of the building intended for demolition.

The gathered data was then passed onto another company, which built replicas of the columns so that the initiative could be tested before going ahead. Once all parties involved were satisfied, remotely-operated vehicles (ROVs) belonging to Reamda and a Swedish demolition company called Brokk were sent in to place the explosive charges using robotic manipulator arms.

The demolition was successfully completed without incident.

“As technology continues to evolve it makes sense that we’ll hand more and more of these dangerous tasks over to machine,” Padraig O’Connor, managing director of Reamda, told Digital Trends. “It’s the same as bomb disposal and the way that we used to send in officers wearing protective suits: Today that’s considered a last resort.

“But this isn’t going to be about replacing humans with robots,” he continued. “You’ll still be benefitting from human experts’ skill and knowledge of these sites; it’s just that we’ll be able to send machines in to do the dangerous part of the job. We’re not doing anyone out of work, it’s just about putting people in a different seat.”

Editors' Recommendations

Luke Dormehl
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more