Video: New Demolition Robot Rips Through Walls, Snips Rebar and Turns Concrete Into Dust

it's kind of like that one power tool that works by vibrating, rather than conventional methods.

It's not cool unless the operator is using a motion sensor exoskeleton. Joysticks are so late 90s.

It's too slow. Humans are faster at doing this! I'm 60 and I can do this faster than this robot can! I challenge it!

motion sensor exoskeleton? That's just so last-decade. Holographic walk-around environment that projects the runtime exoskeleton onto your body, even from across town at the union local, where your temp worker signs in for his day's 'work'.

You are all so old fashion. Why would any self respecting robot let one of those inferior humans control it in any way?

And leave it to a human to come up with a stupid statement like "First, a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm"

Robots really know that if the human gets it way you crush it and put it with the other trash.

BTW I don't see anything special about this machine other then it is too small for the human to ride. Other then that it looks pretty much what happens in the big ones, unless you are amazed at the idea that the controls can be wireless instead of "wired".

Ok; fer serious. It looks like a construction based adaptation of current mining technology. There should be a good call for this tool in earthquake and hurricane/tsunami zones, or anywhere that the danger level will actually allow that kind of transmitted vibration. But it's a big judgment call as to which places won't powder around the work area. And that judgment call directly relates to loss of life. Christchurch, New Zealand is a good example, where repeated quakes have caused damage over time that is much harder to model with locally specific accuracy. It's massive destruction zone spans many construction systems and technologies from the industrialized age. It seems to me that periodic acoustic and xray testing is going to go hand in hand beside this machine to be safe. All that said, Stanley has made the step-by-step advancement of construction tool technology an art. I suspect that this will be no exception, as long as it is accompanied by the testing equipment that must be used with it. It is that combination that will determine how this tool is perceived throughout the construction world.

Yawn, why don't we make a huge steel fist that attaches to your arm like an exoskeleton and have a team of angry construction workers punch a staircase down?

If they are going to use it like this for safety issues they need a video camera(s) and an greater range on the controls.

I agree with the comments that this is a riderless version of a backhoe with similar attachments. A wired remote control? Peace-full revolt? Wireless is remote control (I am speaking to the editor here now). The remote control airplanes I fly (5lbs or less) are wireless controlled and they are not robots simply because I am not in them. This is an electric power tool to make any guy drool who has a demolition project in his future! Here is my definition of a robot: any non-human device which off loads a task from a human such that greater speed, precision, and repeatability of the task is realized.

Simply AMAZING!

--Robot Betty9

www.robots-and-androids.com

@tcolguin
Even you're being old-fashioned! What we should do is genetically engineer a large animal that eats buildings, and let it loose! What could possibly go wrong?

You guys had one of these operating in your own neighborhood! There was one or more of these working on the demolition of the Deutche Bank building at ground zero.

honestly, it looks counter intuitive.

but i guess it sort of moves forward the tedious job of demolishing reinforced concrete.

next step is to have the human arm/s and hand/s interface. with todays tech i believe this to be fairly easy to do. just a bunch of sensors. i would think its basically converting the joystick input programs to match hand movements and have all sorts of sensors on a wearable control unit.

if something like that comes out.. man i'd love to work with those, put me in a demolition site just destroying stuff for hours on end. the thought already puts a smile on my face.

Forget exoskeleton, I can see the user interface being a Microsoft Kinect. Just punch an area on the virtual wall and the robot destroys an actual wall.