Cricket Bowling Machine: Net Bowlers to ABB Robots

A cricket bowling machine lets a batter face hundreds of deliveries in a session without wearing out a single bowler. This post follows the idea from club bowlers in the nets and Nicholas Felix's early catapult to the two-wheel machines from BOLA and the spin machine Merlyn, whose inventor Henry Pryor died this autumn. It then looks at the programmable and AI machines that cricket boards bought in 2026, where ABB robots such as the IRB 1200 and the GoFa cobot could plausibly help, and why a machine still cannot bowl like a person.

A club bowler delivers to a batter in a Sunday match at Epping, Essex. Photo: Acabashi / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From net bowlers to Felix's catapult and Merlyn

For most of cricket's history, batting practice meant real bowlers. Club members and paid professionals bowled at batters in practice nets, often for hours, and a batter's preparation depended on who turned up and how long their arms lasted. Inventors tried to replace them early. Nicholas Felix, a leading English batsman of the 1840s, invented a bowling machine he called the catapulta, alongside rubber batting gloves. Ball-throwing machines have been around for more than a century, and the early ones worked like a slingshot.

A cricket match on the McGill campus in Montreal around 1890, when every ball was bowled by hand. Photo: Unknown photographer via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Human bowlers stayed at the centre of practice through the twentieth century, at county grounds and in school nets alike. Fast bowlers could only bowl so many overs before tiring or getting injured, so their spells in the nets were rationed, and that kept the case for machines alive. A batter who wants to face fifty short balls in a row, or practise against the same off-stump line until the shot becomes automatic, needs a feeder that never tires of repeating itself.

Fast bowler Eddie Gilbert in his delivery stride around 1930. Photo: State Library of Queensland via Wikimedia Commons (no known restrictions)

The slingshot designs gave way to motorised wheels. A typical machine has two heavy wheels, 30 to 50 centimetres across, with rubber tyres that grip the ball and fire it out; changing the wheel speeds or tilting the head adds swing or spin. BOLA, a Bristol company that calls itself the world's number one, makes machines of this type. Then Henry Pryor, a cricket coach in Herefordshire, built Merlyn, a one-off spin machine that its makers said could "bowl any ball known to man". It delivered spin without tilting its head, so batters got no early hint of what was coming.

An automatic bowling machine on a tripod in the practice nets at Radlett Cricket Club. Photo: Acabashi / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Merlyn, TruMan 3 and AI bowling machines

Merlyn became famous when England used it before and during the 2005 Ashes, and the England and Wales Cricket Board bought 20 machines in 2009/10, one for each county. A newer version was later developed by BOLA as Merlyn by BOLA. Pryor's death at 92 was reported by the Hereford Times in September 2026, and The Times published his obituary on 9 October. His machine is still being bought: in April 2026 the Bangladesh Cricket Board installed a Merlyn by BOLA, costing about £10,000, at the Sher-e-Bangla stadium in Mirpur.

Close up of the Radlett machine's head and its control panel. Photo: Acabashi / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The newest machines add a bowler's image to the ball. In July 2026 the Pakistan Cricket Board installed a TruMan 3 at its National Cricket Academy in Lahore and described it as AI-powered. A high-contrast LED animation of a bowler on its front screen is synchronised with the release, so batters can read an action and release point. Coaches can programme pace, line, length, swing, bounce and release height, then save overs or spells and play them in order or shuffled. The Guardian's cricket column argued in September that robots bowling the perfect doosra are still some way off.

Practice nets at Farncombe Cricket Club in Surrey, May 2026. Photo: Mertbiol / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

ABB does not make a bowling machine, and none of the machines above use ABB hardware. Some jobs around them do suit its robots. A compact arm such as the IRB 1200 repeats a path very precisely, so a lab could plausibly use one to test balls, bats or helmets with identical strikes. Coaches already "programme" a TruMan session much as engineers programme a robot through a FlexPendant, and a cell like that would be laid out and tested in RobotStudio first. These are possibilities; none exists as an ABB cricket project today.

The new generation ABB IRB 1200, a compact six axis arm that repeats the same path precisely. Photo: ABB

What the next bowling machines need to learn

At home and in clubs, the next few years will probably bring cheaper machines that feed themselves, sync with a phone app, and show a filmed or animated bowler, as TruMan 3 already does. Baseball went through a similar change, as our post on the baseball pitching machine describes. Pitches matter too. After West Indies chased down 250 against India in October, spinner Yuzvendra Chahal said flat tracks gave bowlers nothing and that India might as well "just install a bowling machine". He meant it as a complaint about the pitches, but it says a lot about how normal the machines now are in cricket.

Programming an ABB IRB 1300 with the FlexPendant, much as coaches now programme a session on a machine. Photo: ABB

Safety is a real issue. A ball coming out of a machine at international pace can injure anyone standing in the wrong place, and someone has to feed the machine unless it loads itself. Robots that work near people in factories rely on limited force and speed and on monitoring, for example the GoFa CRB 15000 cobot, which has torque sensors in each joint and stops when it feels contact, and ABB's SafeMove speed and separation monitoring. A self-loading, moving bowling robot would need protection of that kind to be allowed near young players.

An ABB GoFa cobot guided by hand; it stops when it senses contact. Photo: ABB

The hardest problem is the bowling itself. A wrist spinner hides the googly in a flick of the fingers, and a seamer changes the angle at the crease and the way the ball comes off the pitch from one delivery to the next. Machines can copy speed, line and spin, and TruMan 3 adds a picture of an action, but no current machine bowls from a real arm. Batters will keep using machines for volume and repetition and face people for the parts of bowling that still depend on a bowler's hand.

Empty practice nets at Epping Foresters Cricket Club, where machines and bowlers share the lanes. Photo: Acabashi / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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