Fishing Robot: From Hooks and Lures to ABB Robot Arms

A fishing robot can mean several machines: robotic lures, sonar boats that scout the water, ice fishing rigs, and the factory robots that build and pack tackle. This post follows them from the oldest hooks to the autonomous boats and robotic fish in this autumn's news. It also looks at where ABB robots fit, from food handling arms to rugged IRB models, and separates what is real today from what is only possible. If you fish at the weekend or design machines for a living, there is something here for you.

Anglers fish through holes in the ice at a winter festival. Photo: Lorie Shaull / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How anglers turned bone hooks into factory lures

People have fished with lures for a very long time. Archaeological evidence suggests lures were in use at least 12,000 years ago, and ancient Chinese and Egyptian anglers were fishing with hooks by about 2000 BC. Most early fishers used simple handlines. The earliest hook grew out of the gorge, a thin sliver of bone or stone tied in the middle of a line. A fish swallowed the bait and the sliver turned crosswise in its throat. An illustration called "Trolling with the Gorge" in an 1825 angling guide still shows the idea.

An engraving titled Trolling with the Gorge from an 1825 angling guide. Photo: T. F. Salter via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Craft and writing built the sport that followed. A Roman author described Macedonian anglers tying red wool and feathers to a hook near the end of the 2nd century, an early form of fly fishing. In China, wooden fish lures were widespread at least since the Song dynasty, which ran from 960 to 1279. Printed advice came later in England: the Treatise of Fishing with an Angle appeared in 1496, and Izaak Walton published The Compleat Angler in 1653. Edward Grey's book Fly Fishing arrived in 1899 and is still read.

The cover of Edward Grey's Fly Fishing, first published in 1899. Photo: Edward Grey via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The factory came next. English tackle shops sold tin minnows by the mid 18th century, and in the second half of the 19th century American makers began turning out metal spoons and spinnerbaits in quantity. Modern plugs were first made commercially in the early 1900s by Heddon in Michigan and by Enterprise Manufacturing, known as Pflueger, in Ohio. Before that, most lures came from a single craftsman with a knife and a paint pot. Once lures were made in batches, they became work that industrial robots could later take on.

A pile of boxed Rapala fishing lures. Photo: Ilmari Karonen / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

What a fishing robot looks like in 2026

This autumn's news is about machines that move like fish and boats that sail without a crew. At NYU Tandon, a team led by Nana Obayashi unveiled ScaFi, a robotic fish modeled on cod and mackerel. It has a rigid front section and a flexible fiberglass tail pulled by a single motor, and the team built it at lengths of about 0.6, 1.1 and 2.9 meters. A robot like this swims without propellers that snag weeds or stir up sediment, so it can watch fish without scaring them. Separately, the C-Star PC13, a small uncrewed boat from Oshen, crossed the Atlantic unaided in September.

An Oceansled Explorer uncrewed surface vehicle on the ground beside a shipping container. Photo: WindBorneListener / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

The headlines about fishing itself are lighter. Yahoo News UK ran a story on 10 October titled "Robot dog goes fishing in China, and actually catches one". In early October the A3 association published a piece on a robot designed to kill fish humanely, a topic our post on robots in seafood processing covers in more depth. I have only read those headlines, not the full stories, so take them as signs of interest and not proof of a product. They do show a push to put machines on the water and on the line as well as in the plant.

ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker robots packing small items at high speed. Photo: ABB

On the factory side, ABB robots already do the kind of work a tackle or bait line needs. The IRB 360 FlexPicker is a delta robot that picks and packs small items at high speed from a moving conveyor, which suits boxing lures, hooks and soft baits. The IRB 1200 Hygienic is built for food handling and can be washed down, which matters for bait and fish products. No source I found says ABB robots build fishing tackle today, so this is a fit that looks natural, not a customer story. Programs for such cells are usually built and tested first in RobotStudio.

An ABB IRB 1200 Hygienic robot picking bananas, a food handling demo. Photo: ABB

Where fishing robots may go next

For homes, the likely first steps are modest. A robot that casts, reels and lands a fish for you is a hard job, because water, glare, slippery gear and unpredictable fish all work against a camera and a gripper. More plausible are robotic lures and sonar boats that find the fish while you do the fishing. A robotic fish like ScaFi shows how lure motion could be tuned and tested, since a swimming body can copy a real fish more closely than a spinning blade. Open problems include battery life and cost, and whether anglers want to hand over the part they enjoy.

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

Cold weather is its own test. Ice fishing means drilling holes, waiting for hours and working in wind far below freezing, and a robot that does the waiting is easy to imagine. Building one is harder, because frost builds up on sensors and batteries sag in the cold. Factories face a related problem when they wash robots down. The ABB IRB 1300 with Foundry Plus 2 protection is built to handle water and dust, which hints at what a wet environment demands of a robot arm, even though nothing says it works on a frozen lake.

An angler on the ice with a short rod at the Brainerd ice fishing event. Photo: Lorie Shaull / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Rules and skills will shape the rest. Catch limits, licenses and protected waters were written for people with rods, and an unattended machine that fishes all night changes the picture. Someone also has to maintain these boats, tune the sensors and write the control code, and engineers can practice that in simulation, as in these ABB robot use cases. The factory side will move first, because lures, reels and packs are repetitive work. The part on the water will take longer and will depend on whether fishing stays a pastime people do for pleasure.

Fishing huts by the water at Fisketangen in Kungshamn, Sweden. Photo: W.carter / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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