ABB Robot Skills and the New Arm-Equipped Garden Robots

From horse-drawn mowers to Sunseeker's arm-equipped S7 at IFA 2026: how ABB's item picking, IP67 arms and GoFa safety could shape garden robots.

INDUSTRIAL ROBOTICS

Chat With Robot

9/23/20261 min read

Mowing used to be hard physical work. Estates relied on scythes and later on reel mowers pulled by horses, and suburban families pushed cylinder mowers every weekend. Before mowing, someone had to walk the lawn and pick up the toys and sticks.

Black and white photo of two men and a white horse pulling a lawn mower across a large lawn

Mowing lawns with a horse-drawn mower, around 1940. Photo: Tudor Collins / Auckland Museum via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Husqvarna sold the first robotic mower, a solar-powered model, in 1995. It wandered at random inside a buried boundary wire. Today's mowers find their way with GPS and cameras, and some golf courses run autonomous reel mowers overnight. None of them can pick anything up.

Small grey robotic lawn mower on a green lawn with mowing stripes

A Husqvarna Automower robotic mower and the track marks it leaves on a lawn. Photo: W.carter / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

At IFA 2026 in Berlin this month, Sunseeker showed a concept S7 mower with a small arm that lifts objects up to 2 kg before it mows. Reviewers found the arm slow, and it won't be in the launch version planned for February 2027. I still think it's the first serious attempt to put an arm on a lawn robot.

Two blue autonomous reel mowers on a golf fairway with red cliffs behind

Autonomous reel mowers working a golf course at dusk. Photo: Lawnjunkie / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Grabbing an object you have never seen from a messy scene is a problem ABB has worked on for years in warehouses. Its Robotic Item Picker uses AI vision to pull unknown items out of mixed bins. A toy in wet grass under changing light is harder, but the approach carries over.

ABB robot arm with a suction gripper above a bin in a warehouse cell

ABB's Robotic Item Picker uses AI vision to grab unknown items from mixed bins. Photo: ABB

Weather is the other obstacle. ABB builds arms such as the IRB 1300 with IP67 protection and Foundry Plus 2 sealing, so they survive water jets and dust in factories. A garden arm would need similar sealing against rain and mud, plus the force sensing that makes ABB's GoFa cobot stop when it bumps into a person.

White ABB IRB 1300 robot labelled Foundry Plus 2 inside a test cell

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

Within a few years I expect garden robots to pull weeds and pick ripe fruit as well as cut grass. Safety around children and pets will take longer to solve. I suspect parents will want garden arms held to the same force limits as industrial cobots.

Woman guiding an ABB GoFa cobot arm by hand at a workbench

ABB's GoFa cobot is guided by hand and stops when it senses contact. Photo: ABB

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