Built Robotics RPD 35

The RPD 35 is a fully autonomous pile driver built for utility-scale solar farms, announced by Built Robotics in March 2023 and deployed from the end of that year. Its claim is compression: surveying, pile distribution, pile driving and data collection are four separate jobs on a conventional site, and this machine folds all four into one robot. The published numbers are modest in count but concrete. The hammer delivers 40,000 pounds of impulse force, the machine carries a maximum of 224 piles, and it works on grades up to 10 percent. Every RPD 35 is paired with a smaller companion, the RPS 25 pile stabiliser, whose job is tolerance rather than force: Built states pile-to-pile height variation within 17 millimetres, z-height tolerance within 30 millimetres, and compatibility with cross sections from W6x7 to W8x28. On a solar farm those tolerances are the point, because trackers will not mount cleanly on piles that wander. Safety is where the company puts its emphasis, and the reason is the work itself. Manual piling exposes crews to extreme weather, sustained noise, struck-by and caught-between accidents; Built wraps the robot in what it calls an eight-layer safety system so people can stand clear of the hammer entirely. The RPD 35 also marks a strategic turn. Built Robotics began as a general construction autonomy company — its Exosystem retrofit turned ordinary excavators into robots for trenching — and then narrowed onto solar, where the work is repetitive, the sites are enormous and the same operation repeats thousands of times. It is the opposite bet to the retrofit-everything approach now taken by newer entrants: one purpose-built robot for one job, rather than a kit for any machine.

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