Aquarium Cleaning Robot: From Hand Scrubbing to ABB

Anyone who keeps fish knows the routine: scrape the glass, siphon the gravel, change some water, rinse the filter, and do it all again next week. An aquarium cleaning robot promises to take part of that job off your hands, and a few already crawl across home tank glass on their own. This post follows tank cleaning from the first Victorian aquariums to the divers who still wipe the windows of public aquariums. It then looks at the small glass cleaning robots on sale today and at where industrial arms such as ABB's could realistically help in the back rooms of big aquariums.

Visitors in front of the Kelp Forest exhibit at Monterey Bay Aquarium. Photo: FASTILY / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How Victorian aquariums were kept clean by hand

The glass tank for living sea animals is younger than most people think. In 1832 the French naturalist Jeanne Villepreux-Power built aquaria to study marine animals. In 1850 the chemist Robert Warington explained that water plants could make enough oxygen to keep animals alive, as long as the tank was not overstocked. Philip Henry Gosse stocked the first public aquarium at London Zoo, which opened in May 1853 and became known as the Fish House, and his 1854 book set off an aquarium craze in Victorian homes. P.T. Barnum opened the first American one in New York in 1856.

The zoological station in Naples, founded by Anton Dohrn in 1872, around 1900. Photo: Unknown photographer via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Keeping those tanks clear was manual work from day one. Someone wiped the glass, lifted out dead plants and leftover food, and carried water in and out by the bucket. Large research aquariums came next, such as the zoological station Anton Dohrn founded in Naples in 1872, where income from the public aquarium helped pay for the laboratories. The basic job has hardly changed. Weekly care of a home tank still usually means changing roughly 10 to 30 percent of the water while cleaning the gravel, and someone still leans over the tank with a cloth or a scraper.

Cleaning the glass of an aquarium tank by hand. Photo: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Automation crept in piece by piece. Pumps and filters took over moving and cleaning the water, and canister filters now sit under the stand and run all day. The two part magnetic algae cleaner let keepers scrub the inside of the glass from the outside without getting their arms wet. The first real robots came from the reef hobby. AquaGenesis showed its RoboSnail at the MACNA show in Dallas in 2012, a glass cleaner the press called a Roomba for aquarium glass, and it began shipping in February 2013. A larger model for half inch thick glass followed in 2014.

A canister filter under an aquarium, with a hose running into a bucket. Photo: Fish Tank Society / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Aquarium cleaning robots and public tanks today

Other makers followed. The OceanSwipe 360, announced in 2015 with a crowdfunding plan, runs on a track so it can position itself across the glass, and its webstore opened in February 2017. These units are still niche products, and none of them siphons gravel or changes water. Public aquariums have the same chores on a far bigger scale. At the AquaDom in Berlin, a cylindrical tank that rose through a hotel lobby, divers came in each morning to clean the glass. At Georgia Aquarium, the world's largest when it opened in 2005 with about 8 million gallons of water, divers wipe the inside of the windows while visitors watch.

The AquaDom in Berlin in 2006, a tank whose glass divers cleaned each morning. Photo: temporalata / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Behind the glass, much of the work is already automated. Monterey Bay Aquarium, which opened in October 1984 as the first to show a living kelp forest, pumps filtered bay water into its exhibits at about 2,000 gallons per minute. At night it runs raw seawater, so animals grow inside the plumbing, and staff clear the pipes with pressure driven tools called pigs. Its life support controls are mostly automated. The most recent news comes from India. On 7 October 2026 Onmanorama reported on a ten week hardware programme at TinkerSpace in Kochi, where young engineers built AquaNav, an aquarium that follows its fish, and AURABot, a prototype robot that removes floating waste and invasive weeds.

A scuba diver cleaning the glass of a tank at the Georgia Aquarium while a child watches, 2009. Photo: istolethetv / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

ABB does not make an aquarium cleaning robot, and we found no ABB project in a public aquarium, so what follows is a set of possibilities. The wet, salty back rooms of a large aquarium resemble other places where ABB robots already work. An IRB 1300 with Foundry Plus 2 protection is built to cope with water and dust. A YuMi or GoFa cobot could take on repetitive lab tasks such as preparing water samples for testing, and a Flexley Mover could carry crates of food and supplies between rooms. Our posts on pool cleaning robots and fish farming cover similar wet work.

ABB YuMi assembling small parts beside a lab worker. Photo: ABB

What comes next for tank cleaning robots

At home, the next step is probably a tank that does more of its own cleaning. Glass cleaning robots already exist, and aquarium controllers that log temperature and water chemistry are common in the reef hobby. Linking the two, so that a robot cleans when algae actually builds up and a dosing or water change system reacts to test results, is a modest engineering step. Gravel and decorations are the hard part. A robot that can siphon around rocks, plants and fish without stressing the animals has a much harder job than one sliding across flat glass.

An ABB IRB 1300 with Foundry Plus 2 protection, built to handle water and dust. Photo: ABB

For public aquariums, the promising work is in the service areas: preparing food, carrying supplies, testing water and inspecting pipes and filters. Programs for industrial arms in jobs like these are usually built and tested first in RobotStudio, where engineers can check reach and safety zones before anything goes near a tank. Underwater cleaning of large display windows will probably go to remotely operated or autonomous crawlers instead of arms, and divers still have the edge around live animals and coral. Prototypes like AURABot in Kochi show that students are already building that kind of machine.

An ABB Flexley Mover P603 carrying crates. Photo: ABB

Cost is the first obstacle. A hobbyist will pay for a glass robot, but few public aquariums can justify custom automation for a single tank. Safety matters for the animals, which can be stressed by moving machines, and for staff working near arms, which is where cobots and tools like SafeMove come in. Then there are skills. Aquarists are trained in animal care and rarely in robot programming, so any system needs simple teaching tools. Until those problems are solved, the person leaning over the tank with a cloth will keep that job for a while yet.

A worker climbs onto an aquarium tank to reach and clean its glass. Photo: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Innovation

AI solutions for effortless ABB robot control.

Automation

Robotics

ceojohntran@chatwithrobot.net

+84905311611

© 2025. All rights reserved.

qtran1215@gmail.com