KAOS-MC Land is the KAOS Heavy tracked carrier configured as a mechanical land-clearance system: a 3.0 m flail on hydraulic arms ahead of the tracks, six tools that change on one interface, and a georeferenced record of the ground it worked. This page is the machine, the tool and the work.
Contaminated land is a land-use problem first. A community does not ask whether a field was mined; it asks whether the field can be ploughed, and somebody answers that in writing.
Mine action turns suspected ground back into usable ground, and the deliverable is not an absence. It is evidence: a defined area, worked to a stated depth by a stated method, recorded well enough that the authority which owns the land can put its name to it and a farmer can put a plough through it.
Survey reduces a suspected area to the ground that actually has to be worked. Sending a machine before that processes ground nobody needed processed.
Vegetation and debris off, soil worked to a stated depth across a stated width, recorded against a grid — and nobody in the hazardous area for any of it.
Search, the individual find and what is done about it are a separate discipline, carried out by qualified people under the authority that owns the ground.
That boundary is the difference between what this line does and what a reader may assume a clearance machine does. Proving ground is bulk, repetitive, measurable work over hectares, on ground that is dangerous precisely because nobody knows which square metre is the bad one. Dealing with a device that has been found is one careful expert act on one known object, and it is not a machine's work at all.
Nobody in harm's way is the doctrine across this house. On every other platform the argument has to be made. Here the ground makes it.
KAOS-MC Land is not a new machine. It is the KAOS Heavy tracked carrier in a clearance configuration, and most of what this job demands was already a property of the platform.
CDNS KAOS is one tracked architecture at three sizes, drawn around the absence of a driver rather than adapted to it afterwards. Clearance is a configuration at the heavy end of the family: the carrier as drawn, a high-flow tool on hydraulic arms ahead of the tracks, and an interface that settles what the machine does that day.
The hull is on The machine, the bus everything hangs off is on Power and energy, and what stops a KAOS is on Command and safety. Below is what changes when the thing on the front is a clearance tool.
A high-horsepower diesel and a dedicated hydraulic system sit on this machine, and they answer different questions: the diesel makes electricity, and the hydraulics belong to the tool.
The carrier's drivetrain is unchanged, and it is set out in full on Power and energy: a diesel engine that turns a generator, one high-voltage bus, an electric motor at each track, and a battery on the bus for the peaks.
What clearance adds is the hungriest consumer this platform has carried. Traction on a lane is trivial: a straight line between 0.5 and 3.0 km/h, the same demand minute after minute. The rotor is the opposite — continuous flow at pressure, and a demand that moves violently, because every stone is a load step at the head.
Traction. Electric, one motor a side, each side's torque a value a controller sets, with a mechanical brake in each channel held open by power and closed by spring.
The tool circuit. Hydraulic, because hydraulics remain the right answer for a rotor putting torque into an unpredictable load. High flow, its own pump, and the pump turned by its own motor on the bus. It is dedicated in the strict sense: the flail shares a pump with nothing.
Three things follow. Tool flow answers the tool rather than the engine, so full flow is there with the machine barely moving — the normal state on a lane, and the case a mechanical driveline handles worst. The battery takes the spike when the head loads and returns it when the head clears. And rotor speed, ground speed and depth become three separate settings rather than three consequences of one throttle: on a machine with a shaft from the engine to everything, working more slowly also slows the rotor.
One prime mover, one generator, one bus. The tracks take a small and steady share; the tool takes the rest, through a pump that answers the head rather than the throttle. The engine runs whenever the rotor does — the battery is a buffer, not the machine's fuel.
The primary attachment is a flail or tiller module carried on hydraulic arms ahead of the tracks. It is a deliberately simple machine, and every part of that simplicity is doing a job.
A heavy shaft runs the full working width of the head, in bearings at each end, turned by the tool circuit's own hydraulic drive. Hubs are spaced along it; from each hub hangs a chain, and at the end of each chain is a hammer, a shaped mass of hardened steel. The rotor turns, the chains fly out under their own rotation, and the hammers strike the ground in a dense overlapping pattern to the depth the head is set to.
The chain matters, because a rigid tine looks like the obvious answer and is the wrong one. A tine carries a bending moment: hit a buried rock and either the rock loses or the tine does. A chain has none to break.
The hammers wear from the first minute and are meant to. They come off on pins in the field, and change in sets so the rotor stays balanced.
Heavy plate closing the top and back of the chamber so what the rotor lifts goes into steel and back into the ground, with chain curtains across the mouth.
The head rides on adjustable skids, on arms that let it follow the surface rather than fight it.
Flail and tiller are two rotors on one mount and one drive: the flail strikes and throws, the tiller cuts and turns. Which is fitted is a soil and threat decision taken by the people who surveyed the ground.
The head changes on a mechanical interface at the end of the arms: locking pins, hydraulic couplings, an electrical connection. The carrier's rule about fitted equipment applies to it. The machine reads what is on the arms before it hands over oil, and what is fitted declares its mass and centre of gravity so the carrier can take its limits from it. The deck at the other end works the same way, on Configurations.
Three numbers describe the work: 3.0 m of working width, configurable; a depth that is adjustable and set by threat and soil; and a working speed between 0.5 and 3.0 km/h.
The rotor turns at the speed its own circuit sets, whatever the tracks are doing, so the strikes a square metre receives rise as ground speed falls: halve the ground speed and the same ground takes twice the work. Working speed sets how thoroughly the ground is worked as well as how quickly the lane advances.
| The setting | The figure | What sets it |
|---|---|---|
| Working width | 3.0 m | Configurable |
| Processing depth | Adjustable | Set by threat and soil |
| Working speed | 0.5–3.0 km/h | Terrain and mission dependent |
Rotor speed is set by the tool circuit, apart from all three.
Speed and depth are bought from one another: working deeper removes more soil per metre advanced, and a head will not advance faster than its rotor can work what it is cutting. Lanes also overlap, and whatever overlap the operator's procedure requires comes off the 3.0 m in the proportion it is set at. Where in the speed band a site works is a soil and threat decision, and working speed is a thoroughness setting that looks like a productivity setting.
The flail is the primary tool and it is one of six. All six mount on the same carrier through the same interface, and a real task runs several of them in sequence, each one making the next one possible.
Separation and analysis before clearance: grain, stone content, moisture, and the metal already in the soil. What is found here sets the depth, the speed and the tool.
Wire, root, rubble and scrap cleared before anything else runs. This is the step a program skips when it is behind schedule, and the one whose absence shows up as a wrapped rotor.
Grading. A stated depth is measured down from a surface, and where the surface is a run of humps and hollows the depth becomes an average — not what anybody wanted measured.
The primary clearance tool at the width, depth and speed the first three steps settled, on the lane pattern the supervisor authorized, recorded against the grid the whole way.
Ferrous collection out of worked soil. A field carrying loose metal is a field where a detector team gets a signal every metre, so this is what makes the search that follows possible.
Compaction, where the task calls for it: mass through a rolling drum on the machine's own arms, rather than under somebody's boot.
The order is the site's and not the machine's. A route task may be blade and roller and nothing else; a former battle area may be sifter, rake and flail with no roller at all. What the machine standardizes is the change and not the sequence: one mount, one drive, one identity handshake. Changing what the machine does is then a task on the ground instead of a second machine on a transporter.
Approximately 10.5 m long with the flail, 3.2 m wide and 3.1 m high, 38 to 42 tonnes, and up to 15 km/h on road. Each figure settles something before any ground is worked.
| The figure | What it is | What it settles |
|---|---|---|
| ~10.5 m | Length, with the flail | Quoted with the tool out. Drawing the arms back and lifting the head brings the transport envelope down. |
| 3.2 m | Width across the machine, approximate | Wider than the 3.0 m the tool works, so the lane does not cover the machine's own footprint. |
| 3.1 m | Height, approximate | It settles the transporter and the route survey. |
| 38,000–42,000 kg | Operational mass, configuration dependent | Six tools of six masses on one carrier: the range is mostly the tool. |
| Up to 15 km/h | Road and track speed | A self-move, not a road march — and the whole of the speed anyone drives this machine at. |
The carrier's envelope, and what each figure settles before work starts.
The width is the figure that shapes the lane. At approximately 3.2 m across, the machine is wider than the 3.0 m its tool works, so the outer edge of each track runs on ground the flail did not touch. That is the geometric reason lanes are planned to overlap and planned in a direction: each pass is laid so the tracks follow ground a previous pass already worked, and the machine advances into the hazard with the tool ahead of it. It is also why the working width is configurable — a head wider than the carrier puts the tracks inside the worked lane, at the cost of more rotor to turn and more mass on the arms.
Endurance is fuel dependent, so the day is bounded by refuelling — and refuelling happens outside the boundary. Because this configuration carries its heaviest item out in front on arms, the tool declares its mass and centre of gravity to the carrier.
The machine has a glazed cab with mirrors, wipers and two seats, on a system whose whole argument is that no person is in the hazardous area. It works in autonomous, supervised and remote modes, and the cab is empty for all three.
The carrier is offered with two cabs, and which is fitted is among the five choices that name a KAOS: one with a wheel and pedals, and one with a seat and no driving controls at all. Whichever is fitted, the cab is empty while the tool works.
On the road, people near it. The machine comes off the transporter, along the track, into the assembly area and onto the first lane, at up to 15 km/h. Glazing, mirrors, wipers and a second seat are the right fit for exactly that: a road move, a yard with other plant in it, a crew changing hammers, and weather. Protection in a cab belongs to the part of the day when people are near the machine.
On the lane, nobody. Everybody walks back past the boundary, and the machine works the task alone — autonomous, supervised or remote, under a named person at a station outside the hazardous area. The working state of this machine is an empty cab, and there is no configuration of it in which somebody rides while the rotor is in the ground.
This is the one place a picture can mislead. No cab is an answer to the hazardous area. Protection in a cab is an argument about odds, and this work does not accept an argument about odds when there is an alternative that removes the person altogether. So the cab is fitted for the journey and empty for the work, and working with nobody in the hazardous area is not a benefit of this configuration — it is the configuration.
One consequence costs something. A safety stop on this carrier is cleared by a person walking to the machine, across ground whose status is the question being asked — so the states needing a walk are few, and a hold, a lift of the tool, a return and an end of task are settled at the station.
No radio and no GPS aboard the fleet, with the one ruled exception: the two mine clearance configurations, KAOS-MC Land and KMM-01, carry GNSS and command links, and KMM-01 also carries a marine radar and AIS to see traffic and be seen. The reason is the work rather than the platform.
The rest of the fleet holds the rule because of where it works. The interceptor rounds fly on a fibre, the underground plant is guided down one, and the subsea hulls carry no receiver at all, because seawater does not carry radio and a guidance loop that can be jammed is a liability. Those platforms work where a link cannot be trusted or cannot exist, and the rule costs them nothing.
Mine clearance is different work. It is done inside a boundary the customer set, on ground whose perimeter the customer controls and has surveyed, under a named supervisor who is watching — and it must produce a record somebody audits afterwards, in the frame the site is surveyed in. That makes satellite positioning the frame the deliverable exists in rather than a convenience.
The base KAOS carrier is commanded down an optical fibre from a stand-off station. A clearance machine walks kilometres of lane and drives over the ground behind it, so this configuration carries a dual-redundant command link, with radio, satellite and mesh as its options. The failure worth designing against is losing the link altogether.
A lost link is a defined degraded state that stops the machine or returns it, settled before the task starts. It is never a state in which the machine keeps working unsupervised, and never what makes it safe: the brakes are held open by power and close on their own springs.
Both halves have to hold. The link is how a supervisor exercises authority, so if it is gone the authority is gone, and a machine that carries on down a lane without it has quietly promoted itself. And the safety behaviour cannot sit downstream of the link: a safety function that depends on a radio is not a safety function.
Where the work is supervised, bounded, lawful and recorded, the fit that supervision requires is the correct answer, and the doctrine is upheld by what the machine does when the link goes. The tiers are on Technology and Doctrine.
Mission recording is four things: a georeferenced map, machine state, video and reports. They amount to one thing, and a mine action client is buying it.
Land is handed back on paperwork. At the end of a task there is a document saying a defined area was worked by a defined method to a defined depth, and an authority puts its name to it so a road can open or a family can go home. Everything the machine does exists to make that document true and checkable by somebody who was not there.
Position logged continuously in the frame the site is surveyed in, so what is recorded is the ground the tool worked rather than the ground somebody planned.
The tool fitted, whether the rotor was turning, the depth setting, the ground speed, the attitude and the authority it was under. A track on a map is worth what the state beside it says.
What the machine saw, tied to where it was and what it was doing, so a question asked weeks later about one stretch of lane has somewhere to be answered from.
The task as authorized, the task as carried out, and the difference between them, in the form the client's own quality assurance works in.
There is a reason a machine records what a crew would not have to. On a manual task the record is a person's account of their own work, written afterwards. Here there is nobody in the area at all, so the machine is the only witness — and it records the passes that went badly at exactly the fidelity of the ones that went well.
Where the record earns its cost is the gap: a strip at the end of a lane where the head came up early, the metre where the tool was lifted over an obstacle, the stretch where the tracks slipped and the machine covered less ground than it thought. Those failures are invisible on the ground afterwards, and they are what a later signature has to be built on.
A clearance program either fits what this machine is for or it does not, and the refusals are the faster half to read. Both lists are properties of the design.
A first conversation is about the ground rather than the machine: what is there, who controls the boundary, and what the land has to be fit for.
Bring the area as your own survey has already narrowed it, the perimeter somebody controls, what the soil is, and what the land has to be fit for afterwards. Canadian Shield brings the carrier, the tool set and the record it produces. Every enquiry is screened before any discussion; international transfer is subject to Canadian government permits issued per shipment, and export posture is counsel-first. The reply comes in writing, from a person.
CDNS KAOS is the carrier this configuration is built on. KMM-01 holds the same doctrine on water, in the Water family. Who the line is for is the buyer's door.
Nothing on this page is an offer, a commitment or a representation to any government body. Every design in the line is patent pending. International transfer is subject to Canadian government permits taken per shipment; export posture is counsel-first.
