Demolition Robot History: Brokk to ABB Arms

Knocking a building down is loud, dusty work, and taking one apart carefully from the inside is harder. A demolition robot is a small tracked machine with a hydraulic arm that carries a breaker, crusher or drill. The operator walks beside it with a remote control instead of sitting in a cab. This post follows demolition from hand tools and the wrecking ball to the first Brokk machine, built for a Swedish smelter in 1976. It then looks at how these robots break concrete, refractory brick and contaminated buildings today, where ABB robots already work on concrete, and what still holds the technology back.

A Brokk and Darda 170 demolition robot with concrete tongs taking apart the Hotel Faschina in Vorarlberg, Austria, 2020. Photo: Asurnipal / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How demolition crews broke concrete by hand

For most of the twentieth century, breaking up a structure meant people with tools. Crews used sledgehammers and crowbars, and later pneumatic breakers, the jackhammers that let one worker chip through a floor slab or a road surface. It was slow and hard on the body. Every blow sent vibration into the operator's hands and arms, the dust went into their lungs, and anyone working inside a half demolished building had to trust the slab above. On big jobs the answer was a heavier machine, and for decades that meant swinging a weight from a crane.

A skilled road construction worker with a pneumatic breaker, 1975. Photo: Eugen Nosko / Deutsche Fotothek via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0 de)

The first recorded wrecking ball job was in 1888 and 1889, when the firm Henry Bath and Co used one to break up the steamship Great Eastern at Rock Ferry on the River Mersey. Wrecking balls weigh from about 450 kg to 5,400 kg, and they were most common in the 1940s and 1950s. Hydraulic excavators and long reach demolition machines later took over most of their work, because they are more efficient and can pull a building apart piece by piece. None of these machines fit through a doorway, though, so the most dangerous interior jobs were still done by hand.

A wrecking ball at work on the old Physicians Hospital in New Orleans, 2006. Photo: Bart Everson / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

The first demolition robot came out of one of those jobs. At the Rönnskär smelter outside Skellefteå in Sweden, workers had to crawl into a lead furnace that was still hot and chip out slag and brick with hand tools, standing on blocks of wood and wearing masks. In October 1976 two local companies, PE Holmgren and Rivteknik, built a remote controlled machine for the job and called it Brokk. The first mass produced model, the Brokk 250, went on sale in 1981. Husqvarna entered the market in November 2008 with the DXR 310, which is 78 cm wide, small enough for a doorway, and reaches 5.5 m.

A Husqvarna DXR 140 demolition robot with a hydraulic breaker at the Building Fair in Brno, 2011. Photo: Pavel Ševela / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Demolition robots on building sites and in hot cells

Today these machines take the jobs where an excavator will not fit or a crew would be at risk. In August and September 2024, Interstate Sawing and Demolition repaired the 1,530 foot south breakwater at Algoma, Wisconsin, on Lake Michigan for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The top was only about 8 feet wide. An excavator removed about 20 feet of damaged concrete a day, while a Brokk 300 with a rock drill and a Brokk 500 with a breaker managed about 150 feet a day. The crew took off 420 tons of concrete and finished in mid September, ahead of the October deadline.

The Brokk machine working inside the Hotel Faschina between props and rubble, 2020. Photo: Asurnipal / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Nuclear sites use the same machines. In 2025 crews at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee tested a remote demolition unit at the last hot cell of the former Radioisotope Development Laboratory, where it cuts contaminated material down to size and loads debris into containers. Four Brokk machines arrived from the Portsmouth Site in Ohio in October 2025, which the Department of Energy says saved more than 1.7 million dollars. In May 2026 UCOR operators added a scoop attachment that picks up debris in bulk, saving about 500,000 dollars. Our post on nuclear decommissioning covers the wider cleanup.

A worker demonstrates a remote demolition unit at the last hot cell of the former Radioisotope Development Laboratory at Oak Ridge, 2025. Photo: U.S. Department of Energy (public domain)

ABB does not make demolition machines, though its industrial arms already work on concrete. Schindler's R.I.S.E, developed with ETH Zurich and ABB Robotics in Switzerland, uses an ABB IRB 2600 with a 1.65 m reach and a 29 kg payload to drill anchor holes in elevator shaft walls on its own. In mining, ABB has tested its Robot Charger with Boliden and LKAB so that nobody has to stand at the rock face loading blast holes. A selective demolition cell built around an ABB IRB 6700 or a Foundry Plus robot is a possibility, but no such product exists yet.

Schindler's R.I.S.E drilling an anchor hole with its ABB IRB 2600 arm and a hammer drill. Photo: ABB

Where demolition robots go next

Some of the change is in how the machines are powered. Electric models exist, like the 24 kW Brokk and Darda machine that took apart the Hotel Faschina in Austria in 2020, and they can work indoors without diesel exhaust. Some contractors use water instead of a breaker. Hydrodemolition robots blast weak concrete off bridge decks with high pressure jets and leave the reinforcing steel in place, and North Carolina's transport department has used them on bridge repairs. In nearly all of these machines an operator still drives every move by remote control, and real autonomy is rare.

A hydrodemolition rig removing concrete from a bridge deck for the North Carolina Department of Transportation. Photo: NCDOTcommunications / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Industrial robot makers could help with the autonomy gap. An ABB arm repeats a programmed path to a fraction of a millimetre, and a controller with SafeMove can keep people out of defined zones while it runs. Cutting a concrete wall into reusable blocks, or stripping refractory lining from a furnace or ladle, are repetitive jobs that suit a programmed path. Building sites make it hard. Every building is different, nobody has a CAD model of the rubble, and dust and shock wear out sensors and joints quickly.

ABB's Robot Charger, tested with Boliden and LKAB, loads blast holes so miners do not have to. Photo: ABB

Planning such a cell would start in simulation, for example in RobotStudio with a scan of the structure. Researchers at ETH Zurich have already put an ABB IRB 4600 on a tracked base to build walls, so a mobile industrial arm is not new. For demolition contractors the open problems are cost, the shortage of skilled operators who can run these machines safely, and proof that robots hold up in real dust and vibration. For now most of the work is done by remote controlled machines with a person walking beside them, as at Algoma and Oak Ridge.

ETH Zurich's In situ Fabricator, an ABB IRB 4600 on a tracked base, building a curved wall. Photo: Gramazio Kohler Research, ETH Zurich / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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