Burn Bot is large, tank-like vehicle that wants to solve the most troubling of fuel mitigation questions – how can you manage more area, across all sorts of terrain, in all sorts of weather, at all times of the year, without overtaxing or endangering local crews, and without smothering communities with smoke?
Mechanical fuel mitigation is not new, nor are air curtain burners (AirBurners, for example) or other mobile burning units (See the Blacklining Machine we wrote about in 2011). Burn Bot is a remotely operated, moving fire box that offers a neat option to burn at scale over extended windows across large areas of open terrain or in strategic or sensitive areas.
And neat is the word – Burn Bot can establish a remarkably clean and straight firebreak or containment line. Burn Bot hopes this will attract those who conduct roadside burns, or fuel reduction under powerlines or near sensitive built up areas such as schools, aged care centres or the other community hubs.
After establishing itself on the west coast in the United States, with a base in San Francisco, a single Burn Bot vehicle has just arrived in south-east Queensland, Australia.
It sparked a fair bit of interest at the recent AFAC2026 Fire and Emergency Services conference trade show in Melbourne where Head of Australia for Burn Bot, Clinton Neumann, pitched it as a bigger and better way to get loads more fuel mitigation completed.
“What we are looking to do is to scale up the amount of treatment that can happen across landscapes, to mitigate the impact of destructive wildfires. One of the constraints of prescribed fire is the weather window, where the opportunity to put in prescribed fire becomes increasingly complex and more limited,” says Neumann.
“Because we can control the temperatures in the chamber and dial it up to suite the fuel bed you are operating in, it really gives you a much broader range of operating conditions. You can burn really uncured, green grass, right through to conditions that would be a bit marginal for open burning. It stretches the envelope at both ends.”
The three rows of propane burners aim to operate between 750 to 800 degrees Celsius, with an upper limit of 1100 degrees Celsius, inside the combustion chamber. It travels at the walking pace of the operator beside it with the remote-control device, with a spotter close by to make it a two-person operation at a minimum. The unit has water sprayers all round to catch any escapes but in most circumstances there is also a local crew present on a tanker.
In conditions considered less suitable for the Burn Bot (dense forests, rocky ground, steep gullies), the company brings in its other remote-controlled machines including mulchers or traditional hand-held means.
It is early days for considering it for use in suppression work. It would be a brave fire manager who brought it into a landscape already in a wildfire situation, but under some circumstances it could be used for containment lines.
“Potentially, it could be used for defensive firing operations, where you have got a lot of open edge and grassy country. It’s capable of burning 24-7, so overnight work to put in containment lines could be a good use for it.”
The almost absence of smoke is the other aspect that caught people’s attention at the AFAC2026 expo. With such high temperatures in the fully contained chamber, the amount of combustion smoke is minimal.
“Most of the product you see coming out is actually steam from the moisture content in the fuel…We did some comparisons with open burning and with air curtain burners and things like that, and it performs pretty well.”
The lack of prescribed burning smoke is appealing to complex environments, such as in California, which have strict requirements on air quality. “In California, which is the most complex environment we operate in, it is often exempt from any of the air quality permit requirements.”
Burn Bot is pitching its service to a range of potential users – fire and land agencies, state and local government, large private land holders and utilities. The plan is not so much to sell the units, but to offer a full-service fuel mitigation business where the Burn Bot is one component alongside mulching and other conventional methods.
3 Comments
Maybe in Texas or Nebraska, but don’t think that thing will work very well in places like the Klamath
Have to be proven in the canyonlands of Nebraska……pretty damn deep and steep …for those who have LPCed across some of those areas
Burn Bot might be either rolling down hill or upside down in that topography!!
So they’ve gone and made the simplest (from a burn boss perspective) fuel type more complicated. I suppose there are a few niche cases where this may be useful but unless they can scale it up to work on steep and irregular ground and burn heavier fuels like brush and slash – I don’t see this having much of a market. You can accomplish everything this does with a mower or a plow, while probably using less hydrocarbon based fuel in the process.