Claw Machine History: From Erie Digger to ABB Arms

For most people the claw machine is the first robot-like machine they ever pay to use. You put in a coin, steer a small gantry over a pile of plush toys and press the button, and a three-fingered grabber drops, closes and usually lets go on the way up. This post follows the claw machine from the coin-operated steam shovel toys of the 1920s through Sega's UFO Catcher and the apps that let you play a real cabinet from your phone. Then it looks at where proper robot arms, ABB models included, could fit into arcade games and remote play over the next few years.

A row of claw crane games on Clacton Pier in England. Photo: Rwendland / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How a toy steam shovel became the claw machine

The first machines copied heavy industry. They are believed to have been styled after the steam shovels that dug the Panama Canal, and the first patented version made the link obvious. In 1926 the Erie Manufacturing Company brought out the Erie Digger, named after the Erie Canal: a glass box holding a coin-operated miniature steam shovel that scooped up a prize and dropped it into a chute. It needed no electricity, so it was easy to carry from one carnival to the next, and through the 1930s diggers stood in train stations, hotels and drugstores.

A steam shovel loading flat cars, from Farnham Bishop's 1916 book on Panama and its history. Photo: Farnham Bishop via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Carnival operator William Bartlett added a motor. He patented the Miami Digger in 1932, an electric version whose crane could travel across the whole box instead of swinging from a fixed point, and at his peak he had more than 40,000 machines in the field. In the United States the Johnson Act of 1951 banned moving electronic gambling devices across state lines, and many carnival diggers were seized or destroyed. Owners could keep a machine only if it was worked by hand, had no coin slot and gave cheap non-cash prizes. Those rules did not loosen until 1973.

The Vaudeville penny arcade in New Orleans, around 1910, lined with coin machines. Photo: John Norris Teunisson via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Japan turned the digger into the crane game people know today. Sega and Taito were building trolley-style claw machines in the 1960s, and in 1985 Sega released the UFO Catcher, a bright two-player cabinet that shipped from 1986. Sega had sold 10,000 of them by 1991 and more than 40,000 by 1994, by which time the claw could be swapped to suit different prizes. "UFO catcher" became the everyday Japanese word for any crane game. Under the lights the mechanism stayed simple: an X and Y gantry, a hoist, and a claw whose grip strength depends on the voltage the operator sets.

Sega UFO Catcher Triple cabinets full of plush toys in Akihabara, Tokyo. Photo: Basile Morin / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Claw machine arcades, live streams and robot arms today

Claw shops are opening fast. In the past few weeks US local news has covered a Japanese-style claw arcade opening in Powell, Ohio, a Claw Factory in Lynchburg, Virginia with 56 machines, and new claw arcades coming to Abilene and South Sacramento. Remote play has grown alongside them. Since the 2010s apps such as Clawee, ClawCrazy and Sega Catcher Online have let players steer real cabinets over a video link and have the prize posted home. A cabinet run that way is a small networked robot, with a camera, a controller, a gantry and a queue of players waiting their turn.

Large UFO catcher crane games at a Round1 arcade in Danbury, Connecticut. Photo: Reconrabbit / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Twitch has put the same idea on live streams. In September 2026 Muse by Clio described The Claw, a physical crane game built by Twitch's Brand Partnership Studio with partners Koko Digital and Fooji. Viewers type coordinates into chat, the claw drops, and winners get real prizes, which have included sponsors' products. The team built it into a retro cabinet wired to the web and has run it during sponsored streams. The article is frank about the hardware: operators sometimes unplug the machine to reset it when it moves erratically, and prizes can get stuck in the chute.

The control unit inside a claw crane machine, opened up for service. Photo: Kapolu / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB does not make claw machines, and we found no ABB arcade project. Still, a claw is a crude three-axis robot with a weak gripper, so the comparison with industrial arms is fair. A six-axis arm such as the ABB IRB 1300, or a collaborative arm such as the GoFa CRB 15000 or the dual-arm YuMi IRB 14000, could in principle be the picking arm in a showpiece prize game behind glass, with real grip control in place of a randomised claw. A cell like that would normally be laid out and tested first in RobotStudio, and a simple game routine could be taught with no-code tools like Wizard.

ABB's dual arm YuMi assembling small parts beside a lab worker. Photo: ABB

Where claw machines and arcade robots go next

Remote play will probably keep pulling cabinets closer to real robotics. A streamed game needs repeatable motion, a sensor that knows whether a prize was really grabbed, and a machine that resets itself without someone pulling the plug. Factory automation solved those problems long ago, so arcade builders have plenty to borrow. ABB's IRB 360 FlexPicker, a fast delta robot built to pick small items off moving belts with vision guidance, shows the kind of picking a quick skill game could use. That is a possibility, not a product anyone sells.

ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker delta robots picking items on a moving line. Photo: ABB

At home, the nearest thing to a claw machine robot will likely stay the toy cabinet on a shelf and the phone app that rents time on a real one far away. Companies may use the idea the other way round. Trade-show booths and visitor centres already use robots to hand out samples or play simple games with guests, and a prize-picking arm draws a crowd easily. Our air hockey robot post shows how much sensing and speed even a basic arcade game needs once a real robot plays against people.

A claw crane shop on Jian-Xin Road in Hsinchu, Taiwan. Photo: Tbatb / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Cost and fairness are harder than the engineering. A six-axis robot costs far more than a crane cabinet, and putting one where children play means guarding, safety-rated speed limits such as ABB SafeMove or a collaborative arm, and regular checks by staff who know how to maintain it. Claw grip and payout are adjustable by design, and the gambling laws of the 1950s grew out of exactly that. A robot-arm prize game, online or in an arcade, would have to show players that skill really decides who wins.

ABB's GoFa cobot is guided by hand and stops when it senses contact. Photo: ABB

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