Foosball Robot: From 1921 Patent to ABB Arms

If you have ever lost a game of foosball to a friend who spins the rods like a pro, you have met the opponent a foosball robot is built to be. This post follows table football from its first patents and parlour versions, through university robots that played real people in 2006, to camera-driven tables and robot sports today. It also asks where ABB robots could fit. ABB sells no foosball robot, but its small arms and its tools for sensor-guided motion map onto the same problems.

A foosball table seen from player height, the game a robot has to beat. Photo: Nature42 / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

How table football grew from a parlour game

Table football seems to have appeared in several parts of Europe at about the same time, probably in the 1880s and 1890s, as a pub and parlour game, according to the Smithsonian's history. The patent most often cited for the modern layout was filed in Britain by Harold Searles Thornton on 14 October 1921 and accepted on 1 November 1923. The design is often traced to a matchbox. Thornton's uncle later took the idea to the United States and patented a version there in 1927.

An old coin-operated baby-foot table in a games museum in Loon-Plage, France. Photo: Pierre André Leclercq / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Other origin stories compete with Thornton's. One account credits the Galician inventor Alejandro Finisterre, who is said to have patented his futbolín in Madrid in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War, though the Smithsonian doubts that claim. A 1979 Belgian magazine gave the credit to the French industrialist Lucien Rosengart, who supposedly built a "baby foot" for his grandchildren in the 1930s. The dates are hard to check. What stayed constant for decades was the hardware: a table, steel rods, painted figures and a ball, all driven by human wrists.

Steel rods and moulded plastic players on a foosball table in Brno. Photo: Jiří Sedláček / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The first robots to play it lived in laboratories. In 2006 New Atlas reported on KiRo, built at the University of Freiburg around a commercial table with an overhead camera, a standard PC and four custom control units. Over nine days it played about 22 hours against people. It won most games against beginners and amateurs, a few against advanced players, and lost every game against tournament professionals. Bernhard Nebel, one of its creators, said it still needed to learn to stop and pass the ball. In 2016 six BYU students built a similar camera-tracked table in a single semester.

A cork ball on the pitch of a table football game, the small target a camera has to follow. Photo: DocteurCosmos / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

Foosball tables and robot athletes today

Human foosball is thriving. The World Foosball Tour set its 2026 World Championships for 2 to 6 September in New Orleans, with a guaranteed prize pool of $175,000 and about 800 players expected from more than 30 countries. On 14 October, Heineken unveiled a branded table with figures of KSI, Chloe Kelly and other Baller League names, playable at the league's new arena in Dagenham and in selected UK pubs. These are human games, but they show how many people would want a tireless robot rival for practice.

Players crowd around a foosball table at a hackathon. Photo: אבנר / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Robots are also getting attention as athletes. The World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing in August 2026 featured soccer, sprinting and boxing, and AP and the BBC covered them. A table-top player is a far simpler machine than a running humanoid. Each rod needs one slide and one twist, plus a camera that finds the ball every few milliseconds. KiRo already worked this way, with a new camera image every 20 milliseconds. Cheaper cameras and faster computers make the same design easier to build now than it was in 2006.

Sony Aibo robots play soccer at RoboCup 2005, another early robot sport. Photo: learza (Alex North) / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Where do ABB robots fit? There is no ABB foosball product, so this is a possibility and not a project. The closest match is ABB's small arms, such as the IRB 1200 for fast small-part work and the GoFa CRB 15000 cobot, which is designed to share space with people. ABB also offers Externally Guided Motion, an optional feature that lets an outside computer steer a robot in real time, which is how a camera system could drive an arm. A team would normally build and test such a cell first in RobotStudio.

The new generation ABB IRB 1200, a compact six axis arm for fast small part work. Photo: ABB

What comes next for robot table football

For homes, the likely product is a camera and motor kit that clamps onto an ordinary table and controls one or two rods. It would give a solo player a partner and let a parent set the difficulty for a child. Cost is the first obstacle, because precise linear drives, rotary motors and a fast camera add up. Noise is the second: a belt-driven rod makes more sound than a quiet living room wants. A kit that fits tables people already own would likely sell better than a full robot table, since nobody has to replace the furniture.

Handles on a coin-operated table football game in London; a home robot kit would have to fit tables like this. Photo: James Petts / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The open problems are the ones KiRo's creators named: stopping the ball, passing it and planning a shot against an opponent who thinks back. Safety matters too. KiRo used a light grid to stop the machine when a hand entered the table, and any home kit would need the same protection. Fairness is a design choice. A robot that reacts faster than any person is no fun to play, so its speed has to be capped, as with chess engines. The table tennis robot post covers the same trade between machine speed and a fair game.

An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 cobot at a work table. Photo: ABB

For factories, the payoff is in the skills. Tracking a small object at 50 frames per second and moving a mechanism to meet it is the same job as picking parts off a moving belt, which ABB handles with conveyor tracking and IRB 360 FlexPicker robots. Students who build a foosball robot practise vision and fast motion control on a cheap rig, and the skills carry straight over to a packing line. On the factory floor the hardware is sturdier and the safety rules are stricter, but the control loop looks very similar.

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

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