ABB Robots and the Factories Building Home Robots

Home humanoids are heading into mass production. How hand-built electronics became robot-built robots, and where ABB arms like YuMi and the IRB 1100 fit in.

INDUSTRIAL ROBOTICS

Chat With Robot

9/18/20262 min read

Fifty years ago, building a robot meant building it once. Frames were welded by hand, boards were stuffed and soldered at a bench, and a single unit could take weeks. A run of a hundred identical machines was an industrial project in its own right.

A woman soldering a printed circuit board by hand at a factory workbench in the 1970s
A woman soldering a printed circuit board by hand at a factory workbench in the 1970s

Hand-soldering circuit boards at a factory bench in the 1970s. Photo: Fortepan / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

ASEA changed that arithmetic in 1974 with the IRB 6, the first all-electric, microprocessor-controlled industrial robot. About 7,000 were built before the line ended in 1991. ASEA became ABB, and the pattern held: give an arm a repeatable job and it does that job at the same cost and the same quality on every shift.

ASEA IRB 6 and later ABB IRB 60, IRB 2000 and IRB 3000 industrial robot arms on display
ASEA IRB 6 and later ABB IRB 60, IRB 2000 and IRB 3000 industrial robot arms on display

ASEA's IRB 6, front left, beside later ABB IRB 60, IRB 2000 and IRB 3000 arms. Photo: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Now the thing on the line is itself a robot. Figure's BotQ plant went from one Figure 03 a day to one an hour, and 1X's Hayward factory is tooled for 10,000 NEO home robots a year. Humanoid shipments roughly tripled in the first half of 2026.

A technician in a cleanroom suit standing beside a large white robot arm in an assembly area
A technician in a cleanroom suit standing beside a large white robot arm in an assembly area

A technician works next to a robot arm in a cleanroom assembly area. Photo: Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Volume like that runs on small-parts assembly, which is ABB's home ground. The IRB 1100 and the IRB 910SC SCARA place connectors and gearbox parts at speed, YuMi (IRB 14000) works beside people on delicate sub-assemblies, and GoFa and SWIFTI cobots tend presses and test rigs. OmniCore controls all of it.

Two orange ABB robot arms passing a small part between grippers on a test bench
Two orange ABB robot arms passing a small part between grippers on a test bench

Two ABB arms passing a small part between grippers in a test cell. Photo: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.5)

ABB is also reworking how those cells get programmed. RobotStudio HyperReality, built with NVIDIA, lets a line be trained and validated in simulation before the hardware exists, and the Physical AI Toolchain shown at Automate 2026 pushes trained models onto production robots.

An orange ABB robot arm welding a steel component held on an ABB positioner
An orange ABB robot arm welding a steel component held on an ABB positioner

An ABB arm welding a steel part held on an ABB positioner. Photo: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Where this goes is fairly dull, which is the point. Home robots get built the way washing machines are: fixed arms doing the precise repeatable work, humanoids handling whatever changes from station to station. Volume brings the price down. Whether the robot earns its keep once it reaches your kitchen is still an open question.

A Unitree humanoid robot standing on a trade show floor
A Unitree humanoid robot standing on a trade show floor

A Unitree humanoid robot on a trade show floor. Photo: Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

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