Ceiling Drilling Robot: From Ladders to Jaibot and ABB

Before a duct or a sprinkler pipe can hang from a concrete ceiling, someone has to drill an anchor hole above their head, and a large building needs thousands of them. A ceiling drilling robot does that work from the floor: it reads the hole positions from the building model, uses a total station to work out where it stands, and drills while one operator keeps watch. This post follows the job from hammer drills on ladders to the Norwegian prototype behind Hilti's Jaibot and this year's drilling robots, then looks at where ABB arms have already drilled on building sites and what still holds the machines back.

Hilti's Jaibot drills into a concrete ceiling while its operator stands on the floor with the remote control. Photo: Hilti

Hammer drills, ladders and sore shoulders

Many trades drill overhead. A 2010 study by David Rempel and colleagues lists plumbers, pipefitters, fire sprinkler installers, electricians, carpenters and sheet metal workers, who drill into concrete or metal ceilings to hang ductwork, piping and electrical equipment. They use hammer drills. Fein in Germany patented a drill with an electro-pneumatic striking mechanism in 1914, and Bosch began mass producing its first Bosch-Hammer around 1932. Hilti, founded in Schaan, Liechtenstein, in 1941, brought out the Perfix in 1953, a powder-actuated tool for setting nails into concrete. Whatever the brand, the worker still stood under the slab and pushed the drill upward.

A Bosch GBH 2-26 rotary hammer with a case of drill bits and chisels, the kind of tool used for anchor holes in concrete. Photo: CBX / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The push is the hard part. A March 2011 leaflet from the California Department of Public Health puts it at about 55 pounds of upward force for a worker holding a hammer drill overhead, and warns that concrete dust contains silica, which can cause silicosis. University of California researchers built an Overhead Drill Press that holds the drill on a column. The worker turns a chest-high wheel with about 6 pounds of force and can reach ceilings up to 15 feet. The device cost about $4,000, and the same leaflet put the average workers' compensation claim for a shoulder injury at $31,000.

A worker in a boom lift drills holes for smoke plenum anchor bolts in the ceiling of an MTA tunnel cavern in New York, October 2017. Photo: MTA Capital Construction Mega Projects / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

nLink, a start-up in Sogndal, Norway, calls its Drilly probably the world's first mobile drilling robot in service on building sites. From 2013 to 2018 it mounted a robot arm on a frame that fitted scissor lifts, working with the electrical contractor Vintervoll. A vision system found the ceiling structure, a line laser showed where to drill, and a worker guided the arm from an app. An electric undercarriage later made the robot mobile. Drilly worked on more than 25 sites, drilled over 30,000 holes and once drilled more than 500 in a workday. Its last project, in 2018, produced an app that placed hangers and planned drilling automatically, and nLink then turned to industrializing the robot that became Jaibot.

Electricians on lift platforms install conduit along the ceiling of the future LIRR passenger concourse in New York, January 2019. Photo: MTA Capital Construction Mega Projects / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Jaibot and the drilling robots on sites today

Hilti introduced Jaibot on 28 October 2020 as its first robot, a semi-autonomous mobile robot for drilling ceilings in mechanical, electrical and plumbing work. The robot is cordless and works from BIM data, with a Hilti PLT 300 robotic total station telling it where it is. The operator drives it between work zones by remote control, and it drills every hole within reach automatically with dust control, then marks each one for the trade that will use it. "We looked at which routine work on the construction site is among the most stressful, and that is primarily overhead work," said Hilti product manager Julia Zanona.

A Jaibot operator steers the robot by remote control while a Hilti PLT 300 total station tracks its position. Photo: Hilti

At One Za'abeel in Dubai, the contractor ALEC put Jaibot to work on Tower A in September 2020, and a 2021 study by NYU Abu Dhabi, ALEC and Hilti followed the job. In a basement test, drilling by hand took about 270 seconds a hole, while the robot drilled at least 400 holes in an 8-hour day. On the real floors it was slower than hoped, partly because the robot had to be moved and the site cleared, and it kept drilling to plan where the site did not match the model. At the Dunedin Hospital outpatients building in New Zealand, about 20,000 overhead anchor holes went from a job for 10 people at 300 holes a day to one operator running the robot from the floor.

Jaibot and its total station on an open concrete floor of a building under construction. Photo: Hilti

On 15 October 2026, TIME named DALE, a robot from DEWALT and August Robotics, one of its Best Inventions of 2026. DALE drills downward into the concrete floors of data centers, and Interesting Engineering reported more than 385,000 holes drilled at over 99 percent accuracy. ABB does not sell a ceiling drilling robot, but its arms have drilled on building sites. Schindler's R.I.S.E uses an ABB IRB 2600 to drill anchor holes in elevator shafts, covered in our post on elevator installation robots. ABB was also a partner in COSCR, a UK project led by HAL Robotics. Its tracked robot, with a mast and arm reaching up to 4.2 meters, trialled drilling and anchor setting at Skanska's Featherstone Building in London in early 2021.

Schindler's R.I.S.E drills an anchor hole in an elevator shaft wall with its ABB IRB 2600 arm and a hammer drill. Photo: ABB

Where ceiling drilling robots go next

Hilti's June 2022 update let Jaibot map corrugated metal decks, steer its arm around installed objects and drill walls between 1.2 and 4.8 meters, and DALE is built to work in fleets across large data center floors. The COSCR material does not name the arm on that robot, so a ceiling drilling robot built around an ABB arm is still a possibility. Schindler's choice hints at how one could work: the company picked the IRB 2600 for its 1.65 meter reach and because ABB robots are known for running reliably in tough environments. In Ontario, Horizon Legacy's VAL 2.0, a modified ABB six-axis robot, has printed concrete houses on site, and the team used RobotStudio to make changes during the build.

The ABB IRB 2600 arm of Schindler's R.I.S.E at work on a concrete elevator shaft wall. Photo: ABB

Ceiling drilling robots pay off where the same kind of hole repeats thousands of times, in hospitals, towers and data centers, so homeowners will mostly meet them indirectly. A family hanging a lamp will still reach for a drill, but the flat they buy may have had its pipes and ducts hung from holes a robot drilled. Construction is behind other industries here: in an ABB survey, 55 percent of construction companies said they use robots, against 84 percent in automotive and 79 percent in manufacturing. Drilling and layout work from the same model, so our post on construction layout robots covers the other half of that digital chain.

A modified ABB six-axis robot printing a concrete wall outdoors, from ABB's story on Horizon Legacy's Ontario housing project. Photo: ABB

Cost is still a problem. In Dubai, renting the robot cost 2,500 dirhams a day, so in the basement test each hole came out slightly more expensive than drilling by hand, and that sum left out the cost and time of preparing models, cloud services and equipment. A robot drills wherever the model says, so a wrong model gives wrong holes faster. Obstructions from other trades kept it from finishing whole floors in one go, and calibration errors in the total station or the ceiling sensor affect where the holes land. The worker's job becomes driving the robot, setting up the total station and checking placement on the tablet. In return, the Dunedin operator was no longer exposed to silica dust, falls from height or fatigue injuries.

Jaibot below a concrete ceiling where strut channels and pipe clamps already hang from anchors, with a Hilti PLT 300 total station in front. Photo: Hilti

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