Apartment Delivery Robot: Lifts, Doors and ABB

An apartment delivery robot carries the last stretch of a delivery: from the lobby into the elevator, along the corridor and up to the right door. Couriers leave parcels and takeaway at the front desk or the entrance, and then someone has to carry them upstairs or residents have to come down. This post looks at how buildings handled that stretch with doormen, dumbwaiters, mail chutes and parcel rooms, how hospital and hotel robots learned to ride elevators, and what hotels in China and office towers in Korea are doing now. It ends with where ABB mobile robots and arms could fit, which for homes is still a possibility.

A delivery robot waits in the lobby of the Yotel hotel in downtown Miami, 2022. Photo: Phillip Pessar / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

How doormen, dumbwaiters and mail chutes moved things between floors

Large apartment buildings first solved the last few floors with people. Doormen, porters and concierges took in deliveries at the front desk, signed for them and carried them up, and the bigger the building, the bigger the staff behind that desk. Food and dishes went between floors in a dumbwaiter, a small lift for trays. The New York inventor George W. Cannon filed a patent for a dumbwaiter brake in 1883 and for a mechanical dumbwaiter in 1887. Until electric motors were added in the 1920s, people pulled dumbwaiters up and down on ropes, like the one that leads from the china pantry to the upper floors of Biltmore House in North Carolina.

A dumbwaiter in the china pantry of Biltmore House, Asheville, leads to the upper floors. Photo: Comtesse d'Autodidactica / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Mail went the other way. On 11 September 1883 the Rochester architect James Goold Cutler received a US patent for the mail chute, a glass-fronted shaft that let people drop letters from upper floors into one box in the lobby. His company became the main maker of chutes for hotels, apartment buildings and offices. Chutes later lost ground to mailrooms, which handled more volume and did not clog, and in 1997 the US National Fire Protection Association changed its codes to ban new ones because the shafts could spread smoke. Online shopping then filled lobbies with boxes, and many buildings added parcel rooms and parcel lockers, where residents still have to come down and collect their own.

A Cutler Mail Chute Co. letter box at the Mechanics' Institute in San Francisco. Photo: Daderot / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

The first robot couriers inside buildings worked in hospitals. In 1988 Joseph Engelberger, often called the father of the industrial robot, sold the first HelpMate courier robot to Danbury Hospital in Connecticut, and within a decade more than 100 hospitals were using them. Hotels came next. In August 2014 the Aloft hotel in Cupertino, California, put Savioke's Relay to work. Staff loaded the waist-high cylinder with towels or a toothbrush and typed in a room number. Relay talked to the hotel and the elevator software over Wi-Fi and 4G, rode the elevator, found the room and phoned the guest when it reached the door.

A hospital delivery robot by service elevator doors marked Robot Has Priority at Danbury Hospital, Connecticut, 2024. Photo: Mikael Häggström / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Robots in the elevator in 2026

In China the elevator-riding robot is already ordinary. On 11 September Asia News Network carried a China Daily report on hotel robots, which cited the Beijing research group IIM: the penetration rate of hotel service robots in China passed 30 percent in 2025 and is expected to exceed 50 percent by 2030. One Beijing budget hotel in the story runs three robots across six floors and 372 rooms. At mealtimes, when more than half its guests order takeaway, the front desk puts the food in a robot and types the room number. The robot calls the elevator, rolls to the door and pings the guest. Its maker, Autoxing, started out working on self-driving cars.

Service and delivery robots made by Pudu Robotics, switched off in a showroom, 2023. Photo: Vieinrose / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Office towers are further along than apartment blocks. Naver's 1784 headquarters near Seoul, finished in July 2022, was designed around robots: about 110 Rookie robots carry coffee, food, documents and parcels to staff, and they travel between floors in Roboport, a lift used only by robots. In September Excelland Robotics, a Chinese maker founded in 2013, began trading in Hong Kong. It says it has sold more than 114,600 robots for indoor and outdoor delivery, cleaning and retail, working in hotels, office buildings, malls and hospitals. Outdoors, delivery robots such as Yandex's already roll into residential courtyards in Almaty, but from there to a flat door there are still stairs, doors and a lift.

A Yandex Go delivery robot in a residential backyard in Almaty, Kazakhstan, 2026. Photo: Nikolai Bulykin / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB does not make building delivery robots, and none of these buildings uses ABB machines. Its closest products are the Flexley Mover autonomous mobile robots, which carry loads through factories and warehouses. The P603 and P604 find their way with Visual SLAM, building a map from camera images. A delivery robot in an apartment block needs the same basics, from planning a route to slowing down when people step in front of it. A building also has to let the robot use its lifts and doors. ABB sells building automation and door entry systems, but no source shows ABB linking them to delivery robots, so any role there is still an open question.

An ABB Flexley Mover P603 carrying crates. Photo: ABB

Where building delivery robots go next

In apartment blocks the parcel room is the likely place to start. Couriers drop every box at one point, so a robot arm could sort them onto shelves or into lockers, and a mobile robot could take them upstairs at quiet times. ABB's Robotic Item Picker, which uses AI vision to pick unknown items from mixed bins, shows what the sorting half could look like, and a station like that would be laid out and tested in RobotStudio before anyone builds it. In offices, the Naver approach is likely to spread first to new towers planned with robot lifts from the start.

ABB's Robotic Item Picker, a small ABB arm with a suction gripper above two picking bins. Photo: ABB

For homes, the hard part is the door. A hotel robot phones the guest, who opens the door and takes the food. An apartment robot will meet residents who are out, doors without smart locks, and corridors with shoes, bikes and children in them. Some buildings may give each flat a drop box by the door, and others may keep the robot at the lift and ask residents to come out to meet it. A cobot such as ABB's GoFa, which has torque sensors in its joints so it can feel contact, hints at how a robot might one day hand a box to a person, but nobody has put one on a delivery robot yet.

Lead-through teaching: moving an ABB GoFa arm by hand. Photo: ABB

Cost, safety and skills will decide how fast this spreads. A lift is safety equipment, so connecting a robot to it needs the lift maker, the building owner and often an inspector to agree, and every connection costs money. A robot that blocks the lift during a fire alarm, or nearly runs over a resident's toes as one guest in Shanghai told China Daily, will not be welcome for long. Building staff will also need to learn to load, charge and repair the machines, and part of a concierge's day will go to managing the fleet.

The concierge desk in the lobby of The Grand Doubletree in downtown Miami, 2008. Photo: Marc Averette / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

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