Archery Robot: From Longbows to ABB Robot Arms

An archery robot has to do what a human archer spends years learning: judge the wind, load the bow, draw smoothly and let go without disturbing the aim. Engineers have been working on it for well over a decade, from lab humanoids to purpose-built shooting machines, and 2026 brought a robot archer to the opening of the World Humanoid Robot Games. This post follows the bow from the English longbow to shooting machines, humanoids and today's competition demos. It also asks where ABB robots could help, and what stands in the way of an archery robot at home.

Two archers with longbows shoot at a target in woodland. Photo: TizVan / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

From war longbows to shooting machines

Before any machine shot an arrow, the longbow depended on muscle and years of practice. Bows recovered from the Mary Rose, the English warship that sank in 1545, ranged from about 6 ft 2 in to 6 ft 11 in long. Estimates of their draw weight run as high as 150 to 160 pounds, against roughly 60 pounds for a modern bow, according to a BBC programme. Drawing one again and again was a trained skill, built up over years of shooting, and it shows how much strength the job once asked of a person.

A longbow and arrows on display in the Mary Rose museum. Photo: Tim Sheerman-Chase / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

That training was a matter of national policy. A directive from 1363, quoted by the Shakespeare blog, told able-bodied men to practise archery on holidays. At Agincourt in 1415, English archers were among the forces that won a battle remembered today with a memorial in their name. Archery stayed a human skill for centuries afterwards, and in sport and hunting it remains one. A good shot still depends on stance, release, breathing and a feel for the bow, and that feel is hard to write down as a rule a machine could follow.

Names of English archers inscribed on the Agincourt archers memorial. Photo: Brookie / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Machines entered archery in two ways. The first was test equipment: bow shops and makers use shooting machines such as Spot-Hogg's Hooter Shooter, which fires bows with the same form every time, so changes in the bow or arrows show up in where the arrow lands. The second was research into robot learning. In 2010 the humanoid iCub learned to shoot a bow using reinforcement learning, and a 2022 study reported a humanoid that could grip, draw and shoot a recurve bow at a target ten meters away.

The iCub humanoid robot, the type that learned to shoot a bow in a 2010 study. Photo: Niccolò Caranti / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

An archery robot in 2025 and 2026

The best-known contest so far came in October 2025, at the Hyundai Motor Chung Mong-koo Cup in Gwangju. Hyundai Motor Group built a shooting robot with sensors for wind direction and speed that adjusts its launch angles. Rain disrupted it at first, then it recalibrated and shot a run of perfect 10s. In the mixed head-to-head the national teams won 55 to 54, and in the compound bow category all six national archers outscored the robot's 58 points. A Boston Dynamics Spot carried arrows at the event.

A Boston Dynamics Spot robot dog on a forest path; a Spot carried arrows at Hyundai's 2025 archery event. Photo: Jonte / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Humanoids have kept moving into the sport. On 22 August 2026 a robot archer lit the Zhixin flame at the opening of the second World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, drawing a bow from a robotic horse and hitting its target, according to Global Times. A month earlier, TechEBlog showed PNDbotics' Adam humanoid holding a bow, drawing the string and releasing an arrow. Toyota's CUE, often assumed to shoot arrows, is known for basketball: CUE3 sank 2,020 shots in a row in 2019, and CUE6 made a 24.55 meter shot in 2024.

Arrows grouped in the gold of a World Archery target. Photo: Wacky1976 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB has no archery robot that I could find, so what follows is a possibility. The YuMi IRB 14000 is a dual-arm cobot built for small, precise work, and in 2017 a YuMi conducted the Lucca Philharmonic with Andrea Bocelli in Pisa, which shows smooth coordinated arm motion. A bow is a different load. YuMi carries 0.5 kg per arm, so it would suit arrow assembly or sorting rather than drawing a full-weight bow. The GoFa CRB 15000 carries 5 kg, which still points to feeding and positioning jobs more than shooting.

An ABB YuMi conducts the Lucca Philharmonic with Andrea Bocelli in Pisa, 2017. Photo: ABB

What comes next for the archery robot

Where ABB could help most is in the work around the shooter. A robot in a tuning lab could mount and reposition bows on a shooting machine, load arrows and log results. Sports equipment makers could use cells that fit arrow shafts, vanes and nocks. Before building such a cell, teams usually simulate the layout and the motions in RobotStudio, and ABB's SafeMove software can limit speed and zones around people. The same tools would be needed for any target range where a robot and humans share space.

An engineer programs a robot cell in RobotStudio next to an ABB industrial robot. Photo: ABB

For small teams and students the problem is cost and risk. Hobby builders have already made archery robots from a toy bow, a camera and an Arduino board, and one of them knocked an apple off a person's head in a demo, which is exactly the kind of test that needs a safe setup. A range with robots needs fences, interlocks and rules about who stands where. Many of the skills involved, such as programming moves and handling signals, are covered in the ABB RAPID instruction lessons.

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

For homes, an archery robot is more likely, in my view, to be a practice partner on a range than a humanoid that shoots in the garden. Sport also has to decide what a robot archer is for. The 2025 contest produced a close score, and human archers still won, and a machine that senses wind and repeats the same shot may keep closing that gap. Kyudo and other traditional forms prize the archer's inner state, which a robot cannot share, and that may keep human archery well apart from machine contests.

Archers kneeling and standing with tall yumi bows at the 2014 Kyudo World Cup. Photo: Pierre-Yves Beaudouin / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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