Air Duct Cleaning Robot: From Chimney Sweeps to ABB

The ducts behind the vents in a house or an office run for metres inside walls and ceilings, mostly out of sight. Nobody can crawl through them, so cleaning them has always meant pushing tools in from the outside. The air duct cleaning robot is the newest of those tools, a small tracked crawler with a camera and a spinning brush that drives through the ductwork while an operator watches a screen. This post traces the job from chimney sweeps and hand brushes to the first remote duct crawlers, looks at who builds duct robots today, and asks where ABB robots could help.

A dryer vent duct packed with lint, found during a vent cleaning job in Las Vegas. Photo: Revolff Vent Cleaning Las Vegas / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From climbing boys to the first duct crawlers

Long before air conditioning, the dirty, dangerous duct in a building was the chimney. In Britain, master sweeps sent small boys, often six years old or younger, climbing up inside flues to brush out soot. Machines existed: George Smart invented a mechanical sweeper in 1803, and Joseph Glass is credited with the modern sweep's brush in 1828. Many householders still preferred climbing boys. The Chimney Sweepers Act of 1875, pushed through Parliament by Lord Shaftesbury, finally ended the practice of sending boys up chimneys.

Two chimney sweeps with their brushes in a studio portrait from the 1860s. Photo: Charles D. Fredricks and Co., Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Forced air heating and air conditioning filled twentieth century buildings with sheet metal ducts, and for decades they were cleaned, if at all, with long brushes, vacuum hoses and compressed air lances pushed in through the vents. Interest in what grew inside those systems rose after July 1976, when an outbreak of a new pneumonia at an American Legion convention at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia was traced to bacteria in the hotel's air conditioning cooling tower. The disease became known as Legionnaires' disease, and building owners started to look harder at hygiene in their air systems.

The Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia, where the 1976 Legionnaires' disease outbreak began. Photo: Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The duct cleaning trade organised in 1989, when the National Air Duct Cleaners Association, NADCA, was founded in the United States. It now publishes the ACR standard for cleaning HVAC systems. Small camera carts were among the first robotic tools, since they let a contractor show a customer what was inside a duct before and after cleaning. In December 1994 Gary Rostamo of Steamatic filed a patent for a robotic duct cleaner: a wheeled box about 15 inches long with two motors, a light, a video camera and a rotating brush of plastic strands, driven by joystick from a station at the end of an 80 foot cable.

A camera crawler with lights on a swivelling head, used to inspect small pipes from the inside. Photo: Leonard G. / Wikimedia Commons (CC SA 1.0)

Duct cleaning robots in homes, hospitals and kitchens

In homes, duct cleaning is still mostly done by a crew with a truck mounted vacuum and rotary brushes on cables, and the robot is often just an inspection camera. The US Environmental Protection Agency is careful about the benefits. It says duct cleaning has never been shown to actually prevent health problems, and it recommends cleaning only when there is visible mould, a pest infestation, or so much dust that it blows into the rooms. When cleaning is needed, the EPA points homeowners to contractors who follow NADCA standards and use negative pressure so that loosened dirt does not spread.

HVAC ductwork and an air handler in an office mezzanine at Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge. Photo: Ron Hollis, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Large buildings are where duct cleaning robots earn their place, because ducts in offices, hotels and hospitals are wide, long and hard to reach. Nirmitee Robotics, founded in Nagpur, India, in 2016 and listed on the BSE SME platform, sells duct cleaning and ozone treatment services using its own patented inspection and cleaning robots, and it held its tenth annual general meeting in September 2026. Kitchen exhaust ducts are another target. They collect grease from cooking, which feeds fires, so restaurants pay to have hoods, ducts and roof fans scraped and pressure washed.

Ducted exhaust fans on the roof of a restaurant, the end of a kitchen exhaust system. Photo: SAF1999 / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

ABB does not make duct crawlers, and we found no ABB duct cleaning project, so its role here is a possibility. Some of its technology would carry over. The Flexley Mover P604 finds its way through factories with 3D Visual SLAM, the same kind of camera based mapping a crawler needs to know where it is inside a duct network. ABB's 3D Quality Inspection cell scans parts with an arm held sensor and compares them to a model, a method that could check a duct section for dirt or damage. Our post on sewer pipe inspection robots covers the closest relative in pipes.

ABB's 3D Quality Inspection (3DQI) cell scanning a metal part. Photo: ABB

Where duct cleaning robots go next

For homes, the duct cleaning robot will probably stay a tool that contractors bring along, since few households would use one often enough to own it. What may change is how much it does on its own. Researchers at UC San Diego built DucTT in 2015, a tensegrity robot made of aluminium tubes and cables that moves like an inchworm through ducts in any orientation and runs for up to six hours on one charge. Robots like that could map and inspect a house's ducts while the crew works on the furnace.

The ABB Flexley Mover P604, which navigates with 3D Visual SLAM. Photo: ABB

Hospitals and big commercial kitchens make a stronger case, since their ducts are long, their hygiene rules are strict, and cleaning often has to happen at night. For kitchens there is also a job outside the duct. An industrial arm such as the IRB 4600, already used in the Roboeatz ARK autonomous kitchen, or a GoFa cobot could one day lift and wash grease filters and hood panels, though no restaurant uses ABB arms this way today. The sheet metal ducts themselves are made in factories, where welding and handling robots are already common, as our overview of ABB robot use cases shows.

An ABB IRB 4600 robot inside the Roboeatz ARK autonomous kitchen. Photo: ABB

Most of the open problems are practical ones. A crawler has to handle round and rectangular ducts, vertical risers, dampers and fragile flexible ducting without tearing it, and every building is different. Cost matters too: a homeowner pays for one visit, and the robot must save the crew time to be worth carrying. The safety risks fall mostly on people, from workers on ladders and in attics to anyone breathing the dust and mould spores that cleaning releases. Skills are a problem too, because the technician now needs to drive a robot, read camera images and judge when a duct is truly clean.

A worker pressure washes a rooftop kitchen exhaust fan in Capreol, Ontario. Photo: Achim Hering / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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