Air Purifier Robot: From Open Windows to ABB

An air purifier robot is a room purifier on wheels. It drives its fan and filters to the part of the home where the air is dirty, where an ordinary purifier sits in one corner and waits for the air to reach it. Mobile purifiers have only been on sale for a few years, but they build on two centuries of work on indoor air, from fresh-air rules in sickrooms and charcoal respirators to wartime filter paper and the first home HEPA units. This post follows that path, looks at the roaming purifiers on sale in 2026, and explains where ABB's Visual SLAM navigation and its cobots on appliance lines fit in.

A Levoit HEPA air purifier standing beside a sofa in a living room, 2019. Photo: Home Air Quality Guides / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

How homes cleaned their air before filters had wheels

For most of history the only air cleaner in a house was an open window. Florence Nightingale's Notes on Nursing, published in 1859, put fresh air at the top of a nurse's duties and told readers to keep a patient's air as pure as the air outside. Outside air was often the problem, though. Coal smoke hung over industrial cities for generations, and London's Great Smog of December 1952 killed enough people to push Parliament into passing the Clean Air Act of 1956. On days like that, opening a window let the smoke in.

Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square almost hidden by the Great Smog of December 1952. Photo: N T Stobbs / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The first devices that filtered air were made for people working in smoke and fumes. Charles Anthony Deane was granted a patent in 1830 for a copper smoke helmet fed with air through a leather hose. In the 1860s the Scottish chemist John Stenhouse patented respirators that used wood charcoal to absorb gases, and in 1871 John Tyndall described a fireman's respirator that built on Stenhouse's design. All of these were worn on the face and protected one person. To clean the air in a whole room you needed a fan and a much better filter.

The smoke helmet squad of the Petone Fire Brigade in New Zealand at drill, December 1917. Photo: Albert Percy Godber, Alexander Turnbull Library via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The better filter came out of the Second World War. British engineers copied a paper filter found in a German gas mask, and in the 1940s the Manhattan Project needed something similar to stop radioactive dust from spreading. Irving Langmuir worked out that particles of about 0.3 micrometres are the hardest to catch, and HEPA filters are still rated at that size. The filters went on sale in the 1950s. In 1963 the brothers Manfred and Klaus Hammes reportedly sold the first residential HEPA air filter in Germany, through the company that later became IQAir.

A boxed HEPA filter of the kind used in hospitals, pharmacies and sterile factories. Photo: Antonius hh / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Roaming purifiers and the ABB robots behind the idea

Mounting the purifier on a mobile base is a recent step. At CES 2019 Ecovacs showed the Atmobot, a purifier with laser and ultrasonic sensors that mapped the room. It carried a four-layer HEPA filter and moved to a new spot once the air around it was clean. Ecovacs followed it with the AIRBOT Z1, which went on sale in France, Germany and other European countries in October 2022 with an AI camera on board. Its mapping sensors are the same kinds that steer a robot vacuum around furniture.

A robot vacuum with a laser distance sensor on top, the same kind of mapping sensor used by early roaming purifiers. Photo: Smart Home Perfected / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

The newest example is the NAMUHx A1 from SK intellix, first introduced in Korea. On 18 September 2026 ProductNation reported its launch in Malaysia. It is a purifier on a wheeled base that roams a home of up to 2,000 square feet, watches indoor conditions and takes voice commands through a large language model. Dyson has taken the opposite approach. At IFA in Berlin on 3 September 2026 it unveiled the HushJet Big+Quiet Cool Pure+, a $1,099 stationary purifier designed to push clean air across more than one room.

A Xiaomi Smart Air Purifier 2S, a stationary app-connected home purifier, 2018. Photo: GEEK KAZU / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

ABB does not make home purifiers, but two parts of its business are close to this one. Its Flexley Mover P603 and P604 autonomous mobile robots find their way around factories with AI-based Visual SLAM, the same kind of camera mapping that tells a home robot which room it is in. ABB robots also build and test household appliances. At Electrolux's refrigerator plant in Curitiba, Brazil, a YuMi cobot took over gas leak checks, and a GoFa CRB 15000 was later added at the electrical test station. A purifier maker could plausibly use GoFa to fit filters and run end-of-line tests, though we found no such project.

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

Where air purifier robots go from here

In homes, the next step is probably a purifier that works with the rest of the house. A roaming unit can carry its own sensors, but it would be more useful if it could also read the air quality monitors, thermostats and ventilation already installed and then drive to the room that needs it. The NAMUHx A1 already watches indoor conditions on its own, so linking it to other devices is a short step. Robots that both drive and work are also being tried outside the home: ABB has shown a mobile YuMi concept, a dual-arm robot on a wheeled base, for hospital labs. Global Market Insights puts the robotic air purifier market at about $430.5 million in 2025 and forecasts $1.1 billion by 2035.

ABB's mobile YuMi concept, a dual-arm robot on a wheeled base, in a hospital lab corridor. Photo: ABB

The factories that build these products look much like other small appliance lines. Housings are moulded, motors and sensors are fitted, filters slide into place, and every unit is tested before it goes in a box. Small cobots such as GoFa or the single-arm YuMi IRB 14050 can do that kind of light assembly next to people, and a cell like this is usually laid out and checked first in RobotStudio. Our post on home appliance manufacturing covers how ABB cobots already work on those lines.

An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 connecting test equipment to a refrigerator at Electrolux in Curitiba, Brazil. Photo: ABB

A purifier on wheels has to carry a battery as well as a fan, so its run time is limited and it will likely cost more than a fixed unit for the same room. Its filters still need changing. A robot that maps a home with cameras also raises the same privacy questions as any other camera in a bedroom, and stairs and loose cables can stop it. The biggest open question is performance: makers will have to show, with independent tests, that moving the purifier around cleans the air faster than a good stationary one.

A replacement HEPA filter and activated carbon filter taken out of a home air purifier. Photo: Home Air Quality Guides / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

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