Concept of a Robot Assisted On-Site Deconstruction Approach for Reusing Concrete Walls

Construction and Demolition Waste (CDW) is one of the major waste streams in the EU by mass, accounting for 374 million tons in 2016 (excluding excavated soil), and is made up of a variety of components. Many of them can include dangerous materials and pose specific concerns to the environment and human occupants if not separated at source, but they also have a high resource value and great potential for recycling and reuse if extracted through a more controlled deconstruction process. Current deconstruction methods are ineffective in terms of being minimally invasive (air and noise pollution, destruction from tremors of explosions or abrupt demolition using explosives), safe or efficient. Furthermore, conventional methodologies fail to integrate modern technology (robots, remote sensing, and so on) in a systematic manner. This research work explores the short-comings and strengths of previous approaches and provides conceptual approaches for robot-assisted deconstruction using the example of concrete walls.