Design award winner envisages a future in which buildings are “erased”
Imagine a world in which a team of autonomous, omni-directional robots demolish buildings, recycling materials as they go through a complex mix of hydro-demolition, vacuum pumping and some nifty filtration.
Well that’s precisely the future envisaged by Omer Haciomeroglu of Sweden’s Umeå Institute of Desig who was recently awarded the 2013 International Design Excellence Award for his ERO concrete de-construction robot, which uses high-pressure water jets to strip concrete from rebar and recycle it on the spot.
In Haciomeroglu’s vision of the future, a fleet of EROs would be be deployed at a demolition site. The robots would move about on omni-directional tracks developed by Osaka University. These are cylindrical treads that propel the robot forward and back like a caterpillar tractor or rotate on their axis to make the robot crab sideways. According to Haciomeroglu, this allows ERO to dispense with hydraulic stabilizers and simplifies design.
The robots would scan the site, plan out their own routes, and then fan out to erase the building. They would do this by means of hydro demolition, high-pressure water jets hammering into the cracks in the concrete, pulverizing it and stripping it away by means of a vacuum system. Meanwhile, the water is recycled by a centrifugal decanter to separate it from the solids and the stripped concrete is separated into aggregate and cement and bagged by ERO, while turbulence dynamos reclaim part of the energy used in the process. The resulting bagged and labelled material is sent directly to concrete pre-cast stations nearby to produce new building blocks.
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