Harvard engineers have developed a robot capable of driving sheet piles into the ground, even on remote terrain.
The four-wheeled Romu robot has been developed by Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.
Designed to deal with the challenges soil erosion presents to construction projects and the environment, the robot removes the need for heavy machinery by leveraging its own weight with a vibratory hammer to drive interlocking steel sheet piles into soil.
The Wyss Institute, which is set to present its creation at the 2019 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, hopes that such robots will eventually be used to build retaining walls or check dams for erosion, potentially working together in a swarm.
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