Autonomous Excavator: From Navvies to Robot Diggers and ABB

An excavator operator works the levers all shift, digging trenches, loading trucks and keeping an eye out for people near the bucket. An autonomous excavator does that digging from a plan, using cameras, lidar and software, while a person supervises from a control room. This post follows earthmoving from navvies with hand tools and three-man steam shovels to the first robot excavators in research labs. It then covers this year's trials in Switzerland, Singapore and Japan, where ABB robots fit in, and what still stands between a pilot and an ordinary building site.

NASA's RASSOR excavation robot pushes simulated lunar soil into a berm during a site preparation test at Kennedy Space Center, June 2025. Photo: NASA / Frank Michaux (public domain)

Navvies, steam shovels and the first robot diggers

The word navvy, short for navigator, was coined in late 18th-century Britain, when many canals were being built. From 1830 railway contracts took over, and navvies built the tracks, tunnels, cuttings and embankments with hand tools and explosives. At the height of Britain's railway building, 250,000 navvies were employed. Steam-powered diggers, called steam navvies, existed by the 1840s, but in Britain and Europe, where labor was cheap, they did not pay off until much later in the century. In the United States and Canada, where workers were scarcer, navvy came to mean a steam shovel.

Navvies on the double track between Stockholm and Uppsala at Alsike, Sweden, around 1900. Photo: Nordiska museet via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

William Otis patented his steam shovel design in 1839. A steam shovel usually needed a crew of at least three: an engineer, a fireman and a ground man. On the Panama Canal, 102 steam shovels worked through the decade-long dig, 77 of them built by Bucyrus and the rest by Marion. Diesel shovels replaced steam in the 1930s because they were simpler and cheaper, and hydraulic excavators only took over after World War II, once robust high-pressure hydraulic hoses were available. Our post on excavator manufacturing follows how those machines are built today.

A steam shovel loading flat cars at the Panama Canal, from Farnham Bishop's 1916 book on Panama and its history. Photo: Farnham Bishop via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Research labs then tried to take the operator out of the cab. In 1998 Anthony Stentz, John Bares, Sanjiv Singh and Patrick Rowe at Carnegie Mellon University described an excavator that completely automated truck loading. Two scanning laser rangefinders found the truck, measured the soil face and watched for obstacles, while the software chose where to dig and where to dump, and it loaded trucks as fast as human operators. In 2021 Baidu Research and the University of Maryland reported an autonomous excavator system that ran for more than 24 hours at a waste disposal site, where a compact machine moved 67.1 cubic meters an hour, in line with a human operator.

A Hitachi excavator digs a trench in sand during repairs after Hurricane Sandy in North Carolina, January 2013. Photo: NCDOT Communications / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Robot excavators on real sites in 2026

Retrofit kits took the idea to contractors. Built Robotics sells the Exosystem, an aftermarket autonomy kit for excavators made by companies such as Cat and John Deere, and narrowed its work to digging trenches for pipelines and cables. When it raised $64 million in April 2022 it reported more than 13,000 hours of operation and an eight-layer safety system with a geofence, emergency stops and vision that scans for people. At an old quarry in Tuggen, Switzerland, an unmanned 22-ton Develon excavator running autonomy from Switzerland's Gravis Robotics has dug a trench 300 meters long and loaded the soil onto a haul truck, with a technical supervisor watching.

A Develon excavator at work on Muizenberg Beach in Cape Town, August 2026. Develon machines ran Gravis autonomy in the Tuggen trial. Photo: Husskeyy / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

In September 2026 Gravis, which designs automated excavators and loaders, secured $200 million from SoftBank. In Singapore, JTC Corporation and Kajima are testing two autonomous excavators and two compactors at the Bulim autonomous yard in the Jurong Innovation District. Operators assign tasks and set virtual boundaries from a room 20 meters away, and JTC wants one operator to oversee two machines, halving the operators it needs. The first phase started in January and ends in early 2027, a second phase adds bulldozers and dump trucks, and the machines could reach JTC's sites by 2028. JTC has at least 800 hectares of earthworks planned over five years.

A Hitachi ZAXIS 200 excavator on a cleared site in Singapore, 2015. Photo: CEphoto, Uwe Aranas / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

ABB does not make excavators or autonomy kits. Its robots work in the factories that build heavy machines: in 2008 ABB described how Allt i Plåt in southern Sweden used an ABB IRB 1600 to weld 1,000 kg cabs for mining machines and cranes, finishing a whole cab in three hours instead of a full shift. The business link is newer. According to swissinfo, SoftBank's Gravis investment followed its $5.4 billion deal in 2025 to buy ABB's robotics division, so the buyer of ABB's robot business is also backing autonomous excavators. Any technical link between ABB robots and Gravis machines would still be a possibility.

An ABB IRB 1600ID robot welding a hoist mast section on a positioner at STROS in the Czech Republic. Photo: ABB

Where autonomous excavators go next

The next step is teaching machines how good operators work. Hitachi Construction Machinery said it would start research in October 2026 on physical AI for hydraulic excavators under GENIAC, a Japanese government program, with the AI company Jizai and the Nara Institute of Science and Technology. The system will learn an operator's lever movements from camera footage, work instructions and control histories, including recovery after mistakes and changes in weather. Hitachi aims to use it for clearing rubble after disasters and for digging and loading on building and mining sites. ABB's own autonomy works at factory scale: its Flexley Mover P604 maps its workspace with 3D Visual SLAM and shares those maps with the rest of its fleet.

ABB's Flexley Mover P604, which maps its surroundings with 3D Visual SLAM, among stacked wooden pallets. Photo: ABB

Homes will mostly meet robot excavators through trenches. Built Robotics chose trenching because pipelines and cables need it, and its founder Noah Ready-Campbell put the demand simply: "You need trenches on almost every type of construction." Labor shortages add pressure. Singapore's construction demand is projected to reach $53 billion in 2026, and the industry faces a manpower shortfall of nearly 15 percent across various roles. Factory robot programs are tested in simulation first, as cells are in RobotStudio, and earthmoving software will need the same kind of rehearsal before it moves real soil.

An engineer uses an AR headset to check a GoFa cobot cell before it is built. Photo: ABB

Safety and trust are still the hard part. Chosunbiz reported this month that truly driverless operation remains distant, and makers are adding help for human operators first: Develon's E-Stop option uses cameras and radar to stop the machine slewing or reversing when a worker comes within 4 meters. Cost is visible too, since Built Robotics charged $3,000 per machine per month plus hourly fees in 2022. In the Singapore trial the operator's job moves to a control room. Two operators from Kok Tong Construction went to Japan to learn the system from Kajima's operators, and JTC is documenting the lessons for the rest of the industry.

U.S. and Italian soldiers practise digging trenches with a High Mobility Engineer Excavator near Udine, Italy, December 2020. Photo: U.S. Army / Paolo Bovo via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

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