Garbage Truck Robot Arm: Godzilla to ABB Robots

Every collection day, a garbage truck robot arm reaches out to a curbside cart, grabs it, tips it over the hopper and sets it back down while the driver stays in the cab. Millions of carts get emptied this way. The idea started as a homemade experiment in an Arizona alley in 1969. This post follows refuse collection from horse wagons and hand-lifted cans to the automated side loader, then looks at two places that switched to arm trucks this autumn, the cameras now going onto trucks, a research robot that fetched bins on its own, and where ABB robots could fit.

The gripper of an automated arm on a waste collection truck in Mountain View, California, 2007. Photo: carol / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

How crews lifted every can by hand

For most of the twentieth century, garbage collection meant people lifting heavy cans. In Seattle the health department still ran horse-drawn garbage wagons in 1915, and crews emptied cans into them by hand. Motor vehicles arrived early. Chiswick District Council in London ordered self-propelled refuse wagons from the Thornycroft Steam Wagon company in 1897. The work itself stayed much the same for decades: two or three workers rode the back of the truck, jumped off at every house and swung loaded cans up to the hopper, all day and in any weather.

A horse-drawn garbage wagon of the health department in Seattle, October 1915. Photo: James Patrick Lee / MOHAI via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Early mechanical help went into the truck body. In 1937 George Dempster introduced the Dempster-Dumpster, a system that tipped wheeled containers into the truck mechanically. A year later the Garwood Load Packer put a compactor inside the body, so one truck could carry far more before it had to drive to the dump. Dempster followed in 1955 with the Dumpmaster, the first front loader, which lifted big commercial bins over the cab on forks. Houses were still served by rear loaders, where a worker fed bags and cans into a hopper and a packer blade pushed them forward.

A City of Columbus sanitation worker beside a rear loader truck while another truck dumps its load, around 1980. Photo: David E. Lucas via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The residential arm was invented by a city. Scottsdale's public works director, Marc Stragier, had a federal grant and wanted to mechanize pickup in alleys where summer heat passed 120 degrees Fahrenheit. He designed an arm, and mechanic Chuck Kalinowski built it onto a Lodal lifting frame on a worn 1964 International Harvester truck. It was nicknamed Godzilla. It went into service on August 1, 1969, emptying 80 and 300 gallon barrels while the driver stayed inside. Son of Godzilla and Trash Hog came next, and by the late 1970s automated side loaders were spreading across the United States.

Scottsdale's Godzilla arm lifts a 320 gallon container into the truck in an alley, June 1972. Photo: Cornelius M. Keyes / EPA DOCUMERICA, US National Archives via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Why cities are buying arm trucks this year

More than fifty years later, towns are still making that switch. In September the Press & Dakotan reported that Yankton, South Dakota, had put a new automated truck on its routes, a 2025 Labrie Automizer ARM bought for $394,213. One person drives it, and the arm picks up the cart, empties it and puts it back. City manager Amy Leon said the old crews riding on the back of the truck had many slip and fall injuries and were exposed to traffic and bad weather. On September 28, Norfolk County in Ontario started a cart system for more than 30,000 properties, served by trucks whose arms lift grey garbage carts and green organics carts.

A Lodal Evo side-loading waste truck with its arm folded, operated by Recology in San Francisco, 2018. Photo: Dllu / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Arm trucks also change what residents have to do. Yankton wants carts at the curb by 7 a.m., handles facing the house and at least three feet from anything else, because the arm cannot pick up loose bags. Norfolk will not collect waste left outside its carts. Trucks are getting more cameras as well: in September Waste Management World ran a piece on AI vision systems meant to cut waste truck collisions, and Republic Services is adding electric trucks from McNeilus. Labrie, Heil and McNeilus all sell automated side loaders to cities and private haulers.

A fully electric refuse truck on collection duty in Basel, Switzerland, 2023. Photo: JoachimKohler-HB / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB robots are not mounted on refuse trucks today. In waste they show up after collection, in sorting plants, which we covered in our post on curbside recycling plants. There, IRB 360 FlexPicker delta robots use camera guidance to pick items off fast belts. The skills are close to what a curb arm needs: find an object with vision, plan a grasp and move the load without hitting anything. Anyone planning an arm path to a cart on a crowded street faces the problems a robot cell designer works through in RobotStudio, where reach, collisions and cycle time are tested before any hardware moves.

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

Where curbside collection robots go next

Researchers have already tried to take the walk to the cart away from the worker. In 2016 the Volvo Group demonstrated ROAR, short for Robot-based Autonomous Refuse handling, together with Chalmers University of Technology, Mälardalen University, Penn State University and the Swedish waste company Renova. When the driver pressed a button, a drone lifted off the truck roof to locate the bins, and a robot used lidar, GPS, cameras and motion sensors to fetch each bin and empty it into the truck. ROAR remained a demonstration. Still, it showed how the job could be split between a vehicle and a robot.

ABB's Flexley Mover P604, an autonomous mobile robot that finds its way with 3D Visual SLAM. Photo: ABB

For homes, the next few years probably bring smarter arms rather than walking robots. Cameras could find a cart even when it faces the wrong way, and an arm could refuse a cart with a bag balanced on top. For factories and depots, more of the change is in how trucks are built and maintained. A heavy industrial arm such as the ABB IRB 6700, which handles payloads of well over 100 kg, is a possible fit for testing lift mechanisms or moving bins around a depot. ABB's SafeMove software is built to keep people and robots apart inside defined zones, which any such cell would need.

An ABB IRB 6700 lifts a large solar module at dhp technology, the kind of heavy load a depot cell would handle. Photo: ABB

Most of the open problems sit outside the truck. Arms need standard carts, so every switch means buying and delivering thousands of containers, and Yankton's truck alone cost almost $400,000. Narrow streets, parked cars and low branches still block many arms, and a robot that walks up to the door raises safety questions that no city has settled. Jobs are part of the debate too. Leon said Yankton's automation would not cost anyone their job, partly because the work is hard to recruit for. Robots that fetch bins on their own would need reliable outdoor navigation, a harder version of what ABB's Flexley Mover AMRs already do indoors with visual SLAM.

A front loader garbage truck working between high rise towers in Toronto, 2019. Photo: PvOberstein / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

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