(Bloomberg) — Cody Chiverton has spent the past decade lighting fires. As a former firefighter with the U.S. Forest Service, he participated in dozens of prescribed burns across the American West, in which fire-prevention teams would carry drip torches to ignite dry vegetation, leaving flames and smoke in their wake.

But in June, Chiverton did a prescribed burn with no flames and no smoke. Instead, a tank-like robot pulled by a remote-controlled tractor handled all of the igniting. As it slowly moved along a hiking trail near Palo Alto, California, the robot turned anything in its path — brush, dry grasses, leaf litter — into a dark trail of ash.

“It’s a cool tool,” says Chiverton, 31, who this year joined San Francisco-based BurnBot. The startup doesn’t sell its robots (it has made two so far). Instead, forest managers, property owners and utilities book them on demand, at prices that start in the neighbourhood of $1,000 per acre.