Barn Cleaning Robot: From Muck Shovels to ABB Ideas

Mucking out is the least glamorous job on a livestock farm, and it never stops. Cows and pigs produce manure every day of the year, and someone has to move it before the floors turn slippery and the air turns sharp with ammonia. A barn cleaning robot does part of that job on its own. This post starts with forks, shovels and wheelbarrows, then follows the gutter cleaners and alley scrapers that mechanised the work and the Lely Discovery robots that began roaming cattle barns in 2005. It then looks at the pig barn cleaning robots honoured ahead of EuroTier 2026, at where ABB robots could fit, and at what still holds barn robots back.

Heifers at the feed fence in a free stall barn at Brubaker Farms in Mount Joy, Pennsylvania, 2011. Photo: USDA via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

How shovels, gutters and scrapers cleaned the barn

For most of farming history, manure left the barn on the end of a fork or shovel. Workers forked soiled bedding and dung into wheelbarrows or carts and wheeled it out to the heap, once or twice a day whenever the animals were kept inside. In a traditional tie-stall cow barn the cows stood in a row facing the feed alley, with a gutter behind them that caught the manure. A worker scraped the gutter clean with a hoe or shovel and carried the contents out. It was heavy, dirty work, and on a dairy farm it came with every milking.

A woman milks a cow while a barefoot girl mucks out the byre in Sweden, 1911. Photo: Nils Keyland / Nordiska museet via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Machines took over the carrying first. A gutter cleaner runs a chain with paddles along the gutter behind the cows, drags the manure to the end of the barn and lifts it up an elevator into a spreader or onto a heap. Free-stall barns with wide alleys brought alley scrapers instead, blades pulled along the floor by a chain or cable on a timer. Slatted floors let manure fall through into a pit, and many farms simply scraped alleys with a tractor. All of these move a lot of manure, yet they run on fixed tracks or need a driver, and a scraper blade travels through alleys where cows are standing.

The long central alley of the free stall heifer barns at Brubaker Farms, Pennsylvania, 2011. Photo: USDA via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The first robots arrived in cattle barns. Lely filed a patent in 1999 for a small two-wheeled machine that would slide manure through the barn while driving between the cows, and the Discovery Classic made its first rounds in a barn in 2005. Lely says it later became the S and then the SW, which sprays water on the floor before pushing. In 2016 the company launched the Discovery Collector, which vacuums manure up instead of pushing it, and Lely says that made it the first to offer a manure robot for solid floors. Lely marked 20 years of the Discovery series in 2025.

A Lely Discovery Collector manure robot at work among dairy cows on a solid barn floor. Photo: Eppenga / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Pig barn robots and where ABB fits today

The newest barn cleaning robots are aimed at pigs. On 22 September 2026 the organisers of EuroTier, the livestock fair in Hanover that runs from 10 to 13 November 2026, published the winners of their Innovation Award. MS Schippers of Germany won silver for its MS Smart Cleaning Robot, which automates cleaning in pig barns. The organisers say it combines chemical soaking, washing and disinfection in a single system for the first time, and it uses 3D LiDAR to navigate on its own and reach areas that are hard to get at. Peter Prinzing's Pig-Barn-Cleaner, also listed, removes manure from set areas inside each pen.

A slurry pit at Carrigcleena in Ireland, where manure scraped from barns is stored. Photo: Tim Sheerman-Chase / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

The two jobs are different. Between batches of pigs, every pen, wall and slat has to be soaked, pressure washed and disinfected, which is wet, noisy work in a room full of spray. A washing robot works in an empty room and can take its time. Manure robots in cattle barns, and the Pig-Barn-Cleaner in occupied pens, have to work while animals are present, so they move slowly and must cope with animals that stand in the way. The Prinzing award text says regular automated manure removal improves barn hygiene and reduces emissions, which is the same case Lely makes for its cattle robots.

Heifers feeding along a barn alley at Brubaker Farms, the kind of space a manure robot shares with animals. Photo: USDA via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

We found no ABB robot cleaning a barn, so this part is about possibilities. ABB's Flexley Mover AMRs find their way with 3D Visual SLAM and need no tracks or floor markers, which is the same problem a barn robot solves among pens and cows, though in a much cleaner place. ABB's IRB 1300 is offered with Foundry Plus 2 protection against water and dust, the kind of sealing a washdown robot would need. ABB robots already work further down the milk chain, palletizing UHT milk at Piracanjuba's plant in Brazil, as our post on dairy milking automation describes.

The ABB Flexley Mover P604, which navigates with 3D Visual SLAM. Photo: ABB

What barn cleaning robots need next

Most people meet this kind of machine at home, in a smaller form. A self-cleaning litter box does for one cat what a manure robot does for a herd, and our post on the litter box robot traces that machine's history. Horse owners and hobby farmers with a few animals still muck out by hand, and we found no product that does it for a small stable. A barn robot sized and priced for them would have to deal with straw bedding and uneven floors, which are much harder to drive across than a slatted floor.

A US Marine volunteer dumps horse manure into a wheelbarrow at the Stepp Stables, Camp Pendleton, 2013. Photo: Lance Cpl. Sarah Wolff, U.S. Marine Corps via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

On commercial farms, cost is the first question. Manure and washing robots compete with cheap scrapers that already work, so farmers want proof of fewer working hours, cleaner animals or better hoof health before they buy. Agriland, for one, has reported Lely pitching the Discovery Collector C2 as a way to combat lameness in cattle. The barn itself is hard on machines, with ammonia, water, manure and animals that push and lean. Any robot that moves among animals also has to stop or steer around them safely, and that is easier for a slow floor cleaner than it would be for an arm.

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

Skills matter at both ends. Farmers who buy a manure robot become robot operators, setting routes for each barn and changing them when pens or alleys change, while dealers need technicians who can service sensors and drives on a farm. Engineers designing a washing cell or a robot that sprays pens could lay out reach, spray paths and cycle times in RobotStudio before building anything. Both award winners are due on their makers' stands at EuroTier in Hanover from 10 November.

ABB palletizing robots on the UHT milk lines at Piracanjuba's plant in Goias, Brazil. Photo: ABB

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