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Technology

Autonomous walking excavator can build walls and dig trenches

By Adam Vaughan

18 June 2021

Âé¶¹´«Ã½. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

This walking excavator operates on its own

Dominic Jud

A prototype of an autonomous construction vehicle weighing 12 tonnes has demonstrated that it can operate on very difficult terrain without a human operator.

A Swiss-German team has become the first to successfully convert a type of excavator that can “walk” on extendable struts and handle steep slopes so that it can operate entirely independent of a human operator. They used the adapted walking excavator to build a 4-metre-tall stone wall and grab trees for mock forestry work. They also used it to dig out a trench containing live ammunition from…

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