Asbestos Removal Robot: Sealed Rooms, Bots2ReC and ABB

Asbestos is still in place in many buildings put up before 2000, and in Great Britain alone it is linked to around 5,000 deaths a year. Taking it out is hot, dangerous work, done by people inside sealed plastic enclosures. An asbestos removal robot does the scraping or grinding while people supervise it. This post follows the work from the first regulations to hand scraping inside containment, looks at Takenaka's beam-scraping robot and the EU's Bots2ReC project, checks two October 2026 news stories about removal jobs, and asks where ABB robots could fit.

Workers in protective suits remove asbestos from the C-410 Feed Plant at Paducah before its demolition, 2010. Photo: U.S. Department of Energy via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

How asbestos came out of buildings by hand

The dangers were known early. Nellie Kershaw spun raw asbestos into yarn at Turner Brothers Asbestos in Rochdale from 1917 and died in 1924; at her inquest the pathologist found mineral particles in her lungs and named them the primary cause of the fibrosis. A report by E. R. A. Merewether and C. W. Price, presented to Parliament on 24 March 1930, found asbestosis in 66% of workers employed for 20 years or more, and Britain's first asbestos industry regulations followed, taking effect on 1 March 1932. Use still grew. American consumption peaked at 804,000 tons in 1973, and in Japan asbestos was sprayed onto ceilings, iron frames and walls during the 1960s.

Two young workers mixing asbestos insulation in the Tyneside shipyards during the Second World War. Photo: Cecil Beaton / Imperial War Museums via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Taking it out became a regulated job of its own. The work area is sealed off with polyethylene film and tape, and negative air machines fitted with HEPA filters pull air inward so that fibres are not released outside. Workers wear respirators, coveralls, gloves, eye protection and foot and head covers, clean up with special class H vacuums and bag the waste for licensed disposal sites. In Britain, where asbestos was banned in 1999, removing sprayed coatings, pipe lagging or loose fill needs a licensed contractor, and the job must be notified at least 14 days before it starts.

Deteriorated asbestos insulation on pipework at the K-25 site. Photo: U.S. Department of Energy via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Takenaka engineers in Japan described what this means for the crews: protective suits and full-face powered respirators, rooms lined with polyethylene sheets, summer heat that allowed only one or two hours of work in a suit, and suits and sheets that could be used only once. From 2007 to 2009, with a NEDO grant, Takenaka built a robot for asbestos sprayed on steel beams, a manipulator with seven degrees of freedom on an aerial work platform that scraped with a rotary wire brush and sucked the debris into bags. In a 2009 demolition site test it cleared 15.19 square metres at 13 spots in 1,290 minutes, averaging about half the speed of manual scraping once set-up time was left out.

Workers on a lift remove asbestos insulation in the old Metals Plant at Paducah, 2010. Photo: U.S. Department of Energy via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Asbestos removal robots and the work in 2026

Europe's attempt was Bots2ReC, coordinated by RWTH Aachen from February 2016 to November 2019 with partners including Bouygues Construction and Robotnik. It built mobile platforms carrying lightweight arms with abrasive tools and dust extraction, guided through dusty rooms by optical and radar sensors. Supervisors planned jobs on a virtual model of the site, such as grinding contaminated paint off a wall. In tests in normal residential buildings the robot could reach almost 90% of a dwelling's wall surface, under ceilings up to 3 metres. The project cost €4.77 million, €3.96 million of it from the EU.

Workers use a VecLoader suction hose to remove asbestos insulation. Photo: U.S. Department of Energy via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

On 21 October 2026 the BBC reported that the Kingsway Tunnel under the Mersey faces a £4.6 million programme, from January 2027 to July 2028, to remove about 8,000 asbestos panels weighing around 500 tonnes, mostly during overnight closures. In Illinois, contractor Carl Fioravanti was sentenced in September 2026 to six years and eight months for faking an asbestos cleanup at a former hospital in Waukegan. He fabricated air clearance reports, and friable fireproofing left on steel I-beams was exposed when the building came down, with some of it blown into the neighbourhood. Neither report mentions robots.

Workers on ropes remove asbestos coated siding from Hangar One at Moffett Field, California, 2011. Photo: Zack Weinberg / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

ABB has no asbestos product, and none of the sources here shows an ABB robot removing asbestos, so its role is a possibility. Its catalogue does hold the pieces these projects needed. The compact IRB 1300, with up to 12 kg payload and 1.4 m reach, comes in IP67 and Foundry Plus 2 versions for harsh environments. RobotWare Machining Force Control lets a robot grind or polish while keeping a constant pressure on the surface, the job Takenaka handled with a force sensor behind its brush. Automatic Path Planning in RobotStudio generates collision-free paths offline, much like Bots2ReC's planner working from a site model.

An ABB IRB 1300 small industrial robot with an operator holding the FlexPendant. Photo: ABB

What comes next for asbestos removal robots

The Bots2ReC team pointed out that containment helps robots: once a flat is cleared and sealed off, the site is simpler and separated from workers, so current robot technology can operate there safely. Its grinding processes, planning logic and radar were expected to be commercialised within two years of the project's end, Robotnik already sells two mobile robots that came out of the project, and indurad sells improved radar sensors. The team also suggested adapting the system for other hazardous coatings such as lead paint. ABB robots already grind parts in factories, as our post on grinding and deburring shows.

The EasyGrinder robot picks parts from pallets, grinds them and stacks them again. Photo: ABB

For homes, the risk sits in ordinary places. HSE says buildings from before 2000 may contain asbestos, and the danger comes when it is disturbed by drilling into walls, refurbishment, demolition or fitting equipment such as smart meters; left in good condition and undisturbed, the risk is extremely low. Bots2ReC was tested in normal residential buildings, so housing renovation is the setting these robots were built for. When a building reaches the end of its life, the job passes to the demolition robots covered in an earlier post.

Asbestos removal under way at the Imperial Courtyard Apartments in Irving, Texas, before demolition, 2008. Photo: Mbrstooge / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

On speed and cost, Takenaka's robot averaged about half the manual rate on site, while its makers estimated it would need to be four times faster than people to pay off, and in 2020 Bots2ReC's comparison with manual work was still pending. Reach is another limit, since almost 90% accessibility still leaves part of every wall to people. Planning takes skill: Takenaka's team surveyed the site in advance and wrote six programs for each robot position. Safety does not end with the scraping either. The Waukegan case turned on fake air tests, and in Illinois abatement has to be verified by third party air sampling.

An operator runs the Ancofer grinding cell from a control screen. Photo: ABB

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