Washer · CS-540 · Industrial Series

WASH THE TOWER —
CREW ON THE GROUND

Name: Washer CS-540
Brand: Canadian Shield
SKU: CS-540

A caged, umbilical-fed washing platform. Water up the line, evidence back down.

Treat · Pump · Deliver · Agitate · Rinse

Contact Canadian Shield → Watch the Industrial Film Back to Industrial

Illustrative scene — not a certified performance record. Not an offer.

20 kgreferenceAll-up weight, working class 18–25 kg

≈20 mpracticalWorking height, ground-fed (39 m theoretical)

0carriedLitres of mission water carried aloft

0energeticsWarheads, fuzes or energetic material anywhere in the system

What It Is

The One Aircraft in the Estate
Built to Lean on the Building.

The Washer is an uncrewed façade- and surface-washing platform: a caged multirotor that works close against glazing, curtain wall and industrial structure, fed by a single managed umbilical — water, power and comms in one bundle — from a ground station that treats, pressurizes and pays out the line.

The architecture starts from one blunt piece of arithmetic: a litre of water is a kilogram, and an aircraft that carries its wash water spends its lift budget hauling ballast. So the Washer does not carry its water. The umbilical delivers it continuously, power rides the same bundle for effectively unlimited on-station endurance, and the only water aloft is a small buffer for transitions and head purge. Every other choice — the perimeter cage, the sacrificial panels, the standoff wheels that touch the surface first, the strain-relieved hard point at the center of gravity — follows from living soaking wet at working standoff from someone else's expensive glass.

And the reason to build it is standing on the swing stage. Façade washing today means suspended access: bosun's chairs, rope access, davits and stages — people hanging in front of buildings in wind, for hours, to move a brush. Every hour this machine spends against the glass is an hour a person does not spend suspended in front of it. The operator runs the job from the ground, beside the station, with the umbilical as a physical, inspectable connection to the machine.

The Inversion

Every other aerial platform avoids the surface. This one works against it.

The fleet's airframes are built to keep clear of obstacles; the Washer's whole mission happens at arm's length from one. Wheels touch first and define the gap, the cage protects rotors and glass from each other, and the expensive failure the design guards hardest against is the client's façade — not the machine.

1Umbilical — water, power and comms in one managed bundle; endurance is a ground-station property, not a battery property

0Mission water carried aloft — the onboard tank is a transitions-and-purge buffer, never a reservoir

0Energetic materials anywhere in the system — pressure is bounded to cleaning duty, permanently

How It Works

Five Stages — Only One of Them Flies.

01 The Signature Mechanism · The Umbilical

FIVE STAGES — ONLY ONE OF THEM FLIES

The Washer is a water-handling chain that happens to include an aircraft. Treat, pressurize, deliver, agitate, rinse — and only the fourth stage is airborne. Most of the system's value sits on the ground, on the treat-pump-reel station.

The ground station filters and polishes the supply to spot-free de-ionised water — DI drying is what makes an unattended finish viable on glass — then a regulated pump sends it up the umbilical: a 12 mm-bore hose, power conductors and hard-line comms in one managed jacket on a tensioning reel. The reel keeps the catenary loaded without ever pulling on the aircraft, and line tension is continuously sensed — the primary instrument for detecting a snag before it matters.

The umbilical is also the honest limit, and we publish the physics rather than hide it: the line's own weight, not its flow, caps how high a ground-fed Washer works — a six-to-eight-storey machine on the reference line. Full tower height is an open design fork: a roof- or davit-supported supply configuration, stated here rather than promised. At the hard point, strain relief decouples hose tension from the fluid coupling — a snag never becomes a burst — and a mechanical fuse releases below platform break strength, leaving the aircraft flyable and land-able on its reserve battery with the umbilical gone.

shared fluid-handling module — one canon with Sprayer & Coater

CS-540 · the wash chain — the umbilical is the design driver

CS-540 · the anchor head — flow-through brush + DI rinse

02 The Work Face · Head & Interface

ONE FRAME, ONE INTERFACE, MANY HEADS

The anchor head is a pure-water brush: soft flow-through bristles and rinse jets at single-digit bar. Agitation does the cleaning; de-ionised water does the finish — it dries spot-free without a squeegee pass, which is what makes an uncrewed job viable.

The head mounts through one defined interface — mechanical mount, dry-break fluid coupling, power and telemetry at a single station — so a new surface is a head change or a media change, never a platform change. The family behind the brush maps the line's reach: a rinse-only pre-soak head, an industrial washdown lance for steel and concrete, a reaction-balanced rotary whose opposed jets cancel their own thrust, a wide low-pressure bar for solar arrays, and a camera-and-lighting inspection head that carries no fluid at all. The machine is de-energized before any head change — ordinary wet-industrial practice, applied without exception.

At the surface, the standoff wheels touch first and define the gap. They are soft, non-marking and grit-shedding — a surface-protection component before a structural one, because the expensive failure on this machine is the client's glazing, not the airframe. Brush passes keep off mullions and sealant beads by rule, and the pressure envelope is bounded to cleaning duty permanently: no abrasive entrainment, no cutting-class heads, ever. Wash chemistry, where a client specifies it, belongs to the client and the regulator — with effluent captured on regulated jobs.

interface doctrine — shared with the fleet's payload mounts no abrasive, no cutting duty — a permanent boundary (D19)

CS-540 · WASHER Industrial Series

Capabilities & Specifications

The Numbers, Stated the Way
We State Everything.

Figures below are drawn from the Washer engineering drawing package (CSH-DWG-WASHER-001).

01Dimensions & Mass

Designation

CS-540 · Washer

Configuration

Caged multirotor · perimeter cage · forward work frame

All-up weight

18–25 kg working class · 20 kg reference

Structure

Glass-filled-nylon load path · recycled-PET sacrificial cage panels

02Performance

Working height, ground-fed

≈20 m practical (~6 storeys) · 39 m theoretical — hose weight, not flow, sets the limit

High-rise route

Roof- / davit-supported supply — an open design fork, stated, not promised

Reserve battery

Repositioning hops + controlled descent on umbilical disconnect — flyable and land-able, line gone

03Network & Power

Architecture

Umbilical-fed — the platform does not carry its water; onboard volume is a transitions-and-purge buffer only, by rule

Umbilical

Water + power + comms, one managed bundle on a tensioning reel · 12 mm ID hose · ~0.26 kg/m

Umbilical load budget

≈100 N sustained, set against thrust margin on the reference weight

Control & comms

Hard-line comms in the umbilical · commercial RF C2 · GNSS — radio & GNSS permitted on this surface civil line, stated as a feature

04Payload & Effect

Delivery flow

≈2.8 L/min at the reference coverage point — flow is never the constraint

Ground pump

15 bar class (glazing mission) — regulation, not raw pressure, is the requirement

Anchor head

Pure-water flow-through brush + rinse jets · single-digit bar · 6 bar / ~4 L/min reference point — agitation does the work

Head bar · traverse

0.6 m · 0.15 m/s

Working standoff

0.3–0.8 m brush · 0.5–2.0 m jet heads — wheels touch first and define the gap

Nozzle reaction

~2.3 N at the glazing point (~1% of weight) — higher-pressure washdown is bounded as a flight-control limit

Head family

Brush · rinse-only · washdown lance · reaction-balanced rotary · flat-array · inspection — one work frame, one interface, a head change never a platform change

05Materials & Construction

Wetted path

DI-compatible, low-leach engineered assembly

Design rule FH-1

No recycled-PET part touches process fluid — wet-service resin selection continues within this rule

06Signature & Power

Safety

Strain relief + mechanical fuse at the CG hard point · de-energized head changes · ground-fault protection at the station · closed work zone below — wet-industrial practice, pervasive from the first unit

07Compliance

Excluded, permanently

Abrasive entrainment · cutting-class heads · any energetic content — pressure envelope bounded to cleaning duty (D19)

Scope

Wash chemistry, where specified, belongs to the client and the regulator — never to Canadian Shield

Coverage & Water Use — the Governing Rule

We do not publish a headline square-metres-per-day or litres-per-job figure, because on this machine those numbers are not properties of the machine. They are governed by variables that change building to building — and a productivity claim without them attached is meaningless, so we decline to make one. What we will state is the shape of the answer: on a ground-fed job, rigging and repositioning cadence set the pace, not flow.

Façade geometry & access rigging Working-time efficiency on the face Water application rate per m² Head & media selection Wind at working height Effluent-capture rules by jurisdiction Ground-fed vs roof-supported supply

Coverage and water use depend on the governing variables stated above — no headline figure is published without them. Wash chemistry, where specified, belongs to the client and the regulator, never to Canadian Shield.

In the Doctrine

One Shop Floor.
Two Pay-Cheques.

Canadian Shield's thesis is that manufacturing is the decisive capability. The Washer is that thesis earning a civil living: the same sovereign Canadian production base, pointed at the side of a building instead of the sky over one.

The overlap is physical, not rhetorical. The 5-axis shop that cuts moulds for the defence fleet cuts the Washer's structural moulds. Its fluid-handling module — tank, pump and metering grammar, the wetted-path rule, the hard-point rule — is one shared design canon with the Sprayer and Coater lines, drawn once and instanced three ways. Its cage and braced-stance control heritage comes straight from the Rock Scaler, the estate's other contact-tolerant airframe. Civil revenue and defence readiness draw on the same tooling, the same materials rules and the same machines — which is exactly the point.

And up here, the estate's radio boundary runs the other way. The no-radio rule governs the defence, underground and tethered platforms without exception — but the Industrial line is the surface civil exception where radio and GNSS are permitted, and the Washer uses both openly: commercial RF and GNSS for command, navigation and the work record, with hard-line comms in the umbilical besides, because a wire beside the hose beats any RF link downtown. A city street is not a jammed battlefield, and we do not price it like one.

radio & GNSS permitted — this line only, never underground shared fluid module, cage heritage & mould shop with the fleet

The Safety Case

The machine hangs off the building — so nobody else has to.

Suspended access — swing stages, bosun's chairs, rope work — is the hazard this machine exists to displace. The operator stands on the ground beside the station; the umbilical is a physical, inspectable link; and a snag resolves as sensed tension and a mechanical fuse, not as a person on a rope in the wind. That is a safety argument a building owner can audit.

1Fluid-handling design canon across Washer, Sprayer and Coater — drawn once, instanced per platform

5-axisThe owned mould shop behind both lines — existing capability, running today

2Markets carried by one engineering base — the shop floor pays for itself twice

On the Building

Dirty Glass In.
A Spot-Free Face Out.

A Washer job is a ground operation with an airborne stage: the station sets up at the base, the machine climbs the face on its line, and the crew never leaves the pavement. Here is the day, end to end.

1 · Arrive

The Station Sets, the Zone Closes

The crew arrives by truck: aircraft, treat-pump-reel station, umbilical on its reel, heads in their cases. The work zone beneath the face is closed and coned, the station plumbs to site water and power, and the RO/DI train polishes the supply to spot-free before the first rotor turns.

The survey pass: the inspection head flies the face first — condition mapped before a drop of water moves.
The boundary: ground-fault protection at the station; effluent capture rigged where the jurisdiction requires it.

2 · Work

Wheels Touch, the Face Gets Worked

The platform rises on the paying-out line, wheels touch first to set the standoff, and the brush works serpentine passes at single-digit bar — agitation doing the cleaning, DI rinse sheeting behind it to dry spot-free. Reel tension holds the catenary; sensed line tension watches for snags the whole time.

Operator's job: run the plan from the ground, watch the machine, own the exceptions.
Machine's job: hold standoff, keep off the mullions, and finish the pane it started.

3 · Recover

Purge, Reel In, Roll Away

At the end of the face the head purges from the onboard buffer, the platform descends with the reel taking up line, and the umbilical — a wear item with a defined retirement life — is inspected as it winds. Captured effluent leaves in its module on regulated jobs; pure-water run-off has already dried off the glass.

What leaves: the machine, the station, the line and every drop of regulated effluent.
What remains: a spot-free façade — and nobody ever hung in front of it.

Scenario illustrates the design intent of the operating loop. Cleaning performance across glazing types, coatings and soil loads — and flight authorization for close-proximity urban work — are exactly what the bench and flight program exists to establish, jurisdiction by jurisdiction.

One Canon, Three Fluid Machines

The Washer's Nearest Relations.

The fluid-handling module — tank, pump and metering grammar, the wetted-path rule, the hard-point rule — is drawn once and instanced across three platforms. The cage and braced-stance control heritage comes from a fourth.

This system

CS-540 · Industrial

Washer

A caged, umbilical-fed washing platform. Water up the line, evidence back down.

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CS-560 · Industrial

Sprayer

Full-width boom, drift-reduction nozzles, a metered rate held across the pass. The broadcast tool for the uniform job.

Download PDF ↓

CS-550 · Industrial

Coater

An umbilical-fed applicator platform. The pressure stays on the ground; the machine flies the last few hundred millimetres.

Download PDF ↓

CS-530 · Industrial

Rock Scaler

A contact-tolerant aerial platform sets the hook. A ground-anchored winch does the pulling.

Download PDF ↓

The Work Face

The Building Gets Washed.
Nobody Hangs Off It.

If you own a glass face, a tank farm or a solar field — and a suspended-access bill with a risk register attached — the conversation starts with your building, and with the machine built to lean on it so your people never have to.

Contact Canadian Shield → Watch the Industrial Film → The Industrial Line The Fleet

Full Marketing Package

The Rest of the Fleet.

Every Canadian Shield platform has a brochure like this one — same depth, same status discipline, same refusal to publish a number we cannot source. Organized by family below.

Air · 8