‘Roomba for the forest’ could be next SoCal wildfire weapon

LOS ANGELES — A giant, remote-controlled vehicle — somewhere between a tractor trailer, a tank and a Zamboni in appearance — slowly rolled across the dry, brittle grass growing between a tangle of freeways in Thousand Oaks.

Inside it, fire churned. As it rolled over the land, that fire incinerated any brush it encountered, leaving only a thin smoke cloud billowing from the top of the machine, some flashes of orange and red from behind its metal skirt and, in its wake, a desolate, smoldering black line.

BurnBot isn’t the fastest way to rid a landscape of dangerously flammable vegetation — its top speed is about 0.5 mph — but it can do something that traditional vegetation management techniques cannot: with almost surgical precision, it can kill the flammable brush sitting within feet of h