Babysitting Robot: From Nannies to ABB Cobot Safety

A babysitting robot comes up every time a new home robot is shown: a machine that watches the children while the adults get on with their day. Nothing on sale should be trusted with that job alone, but pieces of it exist, from baby monitors to talking companion robots. This post follows the story from Edwardian nursemaids to the first baby monitor, looks at what a September 2026 study of children and a talking robot found, and asks what the safety engineering in ABB's cobots could teach anyone who builds a robot to work near a child.

A nursemaid sits on a park bench while four small children play with baby carriages in Washington, about 1920. Photo: National Photo Company via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

From nursemaids to the Radio Nurse

Before any gadget, childcare was done by people, and it became a trained profession. Emily Ward founded Norland in Kensington in 1892, and the college still trains nannies and nursery nurses. Families who could pay hired a nurse or nursemaid to take the children to the park and mind the baby carriage, as in a US National Photo Company picture from about 1920, where a nursemaid sits on a bench while four small children play around a pram. Her main tool was attention, and she could not be in two places at once.

A uniformed nurse holds a baby with two small children in Queensland, between 1900 and 1910. Photo: State Library of Queensland via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The first attempt to automate a little of that attention came in the late 1930s. Zenith's Radio Nurse, designed by Isamu Noguchi, went on sale in 1938. Zenith's president, Eugene McDonald, had worried about his infant daughter after the Lindbergh kidnapping. A Guardian Ear transmitter stood near the crib and a Bakelite receiver stayed with the parents. At $19.95 it was expensive, it shared a radio frequency with car radios and garage door openers, and its signal leaked outside the house, so strangers could overhear. Zenith stopped production in 1942.

A Zenith Radio Nurse receiver in Bakelite, designed by Isamu Noguchi in the late 1930s. Photo: Sailko / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

Baby monitors never went away. They got better at hearing and then at seeing, and a modern video set pairs a camera ringed with small lights with a handheld screen. The old problems came along too. A voluntary US standard, ASTM F2951, covers the risk of monitor cords entangling infants, and a 2018 article in The Register carried the headline that a baby monitor can be hacked into a spycam. Studies have also found no evidence that monitoring reduces SIDS. A monitor reports what it senses and does nothing about it. A babysitting robot is meant to close that gap.

A digital video baby monitor, with the nursery camera and the parent's handheld screen. Photo: Kingrattus / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Talking robots for kids, and what the 2026 study found

The robots that share homes with children today are companions and tutors. At a technology museum exhibit in Catalonia this autumn, LOVOT, Buddy, Moxie and Aibo sat together on one carpet. Moxie is a warning about dependence. Its maker, Embodied, announced in December 2024 that it was closing after a failed funding round. Moxie used cloud language models, so the $799 robot was expected to stop working within days. Parents had bought a friend for a child, and the child lost it when a company ran out of money.

LOVOT, Buddy, Moxie and Aibo on display at the MNACTEC technology museum in Catalonia in 2026. Photo: Enric / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

On 23 September 2026 the University of Cincinnati reported a study in which 41 children aged 5 to 10 played three games with Miko, a commercial robot that uses generative AI. The children tended to believe what it told them. Some, especially those who found friends hard to make, said they liked talking to it because it would not judge them. Miko steered one child away from a story that turned scary. Half the children already used AI agents at home. The sample is small. Humanoids such as Pepper, shown talking to a child at a Warsaw science picnic in 2019, meet children the same way.

A Pepper humanoid robot talks to a child at the Copernicus Science Centre's science picnic in Warsaw, 2019. Photo: Klarqa / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Clinics use these robots with more care. An Italian trial called A Story for Pepper and Nao has children aged 7 to 16 with neuromotor impairment teach a social robot to put picture stories in order, to exercise memory and motor planning. About 80 children are planned, and no results are published yet. ABB is not in this field. It sells no child care robot, and no source says it plans to. What it has is safety design for robots working near people. The GoFa CRB 15000, launched in February 2021 for payloads up to 5 kilograms, has torque sensors in its joints, can be moved by hand, and stops when it feels unexpected contact.

Moving an ABB GoFa arm by hand, the way a position is taught without code. Photo: ABB

What a robot near a child would have to get right

ABB's YuMi, introduced in 2015, takes another approach. This dual arm cobot has soft padding over its arms and force sensing, so contact is absorbed instead of hurting someone. ABB's SafeMove software adds monitored zones and speed limits. All of this was tuned for adult workers in known layouts, and a child is smaller, less predictable and likely to grab, climb or fall. The sensible reading is that a cobot's safety features are a starting point for a home robot and not a certificate for one. ABB positions SWIFTI, launched alongside GoFa, as the faster of the two, and a home design would likely give up speed first.

An ABB YuMi dual arm robot with padded arms, photographed in 2019. Photo: Stilfehler / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Children and ABB robots already meet in classrooms, where students program YuMi in school labs in Italy. That is probably the safest place for the first encounter, because the arm sits behind a teacher's rules and the program can be tested before it runs. Teams building robots for homes can do the same by simulating the layout first, and programs like these are usually built and checked in RobotStudio before they touch hardware. Our guide to ABB robot use cases shows where cobots work among people today.

Students working with ABB YuMi robots in an Italian school lab. Photo: ABB

Welding robots like the orange ABB arms in the photo are usually kept behind guards, the opposite of a home robot's job. For homes, the near future looks like narrow helpers with fixed jobs. Mixing a bottle is one example, covered in our post on the baby formula robot, and it already raises questions about dosing and hygiene. Three open problems stand in the way of anything larger. Cost is one, and Moxie shows what happens when a robot depends on a company's cloud. Safety is another, covering both the arm and what the robot says. The third is skill: the Cincinnati researchers argued that children need AI literacy early, and parents probably do too.

Orange ABB welding robots behind a glass screen at the Technisches Museum Wien in 2013. Photo: Projekt ANA / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

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