Graffiti Removal Robot: Scrub Brushes to ABB Arms

A tag sprayed on a brick wall takes seconds. Getting it off can take a crew an afternoon, a truck of solvents and a pressure washer, and the tag is often back within days. That gap is why cities and inventors keep trying to build a graffiti removal robot. This post follows the job from buckets and brushes to the paint spraying drones and laser cleaners being tested now. It also looks at where ABB paint robots and cobots could fit, both as machines that already exist in factories and as ideas nobody has tried on a city wall yet.

A worker sprays cleaner on a tag on a brick wall, 2022. Photo: Chad Davis / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

From the subway buff to paint rollers on poles

New York shows how big the problem got before any machine was involved. Photographers working for the federal Documerica project shot subway cars in 1973 covered in spray paint inside and out, from the Lexington Avenue line to the Broadway local. The transit authority answered with brushes, solvents and chemical train washes that graffiti writers called the buff, which often left faded smears of color behind. What finally worked was a rule. Under the Clean Car Program, started in 1984, a tagged car was pulled from service until it was clean, and the last graffiti covered car left the system in 1989.

A New York subway train covered in spray paint, photographed for the Documerica project in May 1973. Photo: Erik Calonius / NARA via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Most cities never had a car wash for their walls, so the work stayed manual. Crews carried rollers on long poles and buckets of paint close to the wall color, and covered tags where they found them. Politicians joined in for the cameras: a 1989 Los Angeles Times photo shows city councilman Nate Holden rolling paint over a tagged wall. Brick and stone were harder, because fresh paint on masonry looks like a patch. On those surfaces crews brushed on chemical strippers and scrubbed, slow and messy work that still goes on today in most towns.

Los Angeles councilman Nate Holden helps paint over a graffiti covered wall, 1989. Photo: J. Albert Diaz, Los Angeles Times / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

The first step toward machines was the hot water pressure washer mounted on a truck. Highway departments such as the Oregon Department of Transportation fitted trucks with tanks, pumps and hose reels, so one worker could blast paint off concrete under a freeway without hauling gear by hand. Soda blasting and dry ice blasting are used on softer surfaces where water at full pressure would do damage. Each of these tools cut the hours spent on a single tag. Every one of them still needed a person holding the nozzle, often on a ladder or next to traffic, and that person is what the newest machines try to keep out of harm's way.

An Oregon Department of Transportation graffiti abatement crew pressure washes a wall on I-405 in Portland, 2009. Photo: Oregon Department of Transportation / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Drones, lasers and robot painters today

In 2024 the Washington State Department of Transportation became, by its own account, the first transportation agency to fight graffiti with drones. Mike Gauger, who leads its Tacoma area maintenance crew, suggested the idea and worked with Aquiline Drones on a prototype that sprays paint fed through a tethered hose from the ground. The agency said graffiti had cost it over $815,000 and nearly 10,300 hours of labor in the previous year. A later WSDOT report called the drone very effective, with 21 missions in 2024 covering about $22,000 worth of graffiti on high walls and bridges.

An agricultural drone spraying a field. Washington's graffiti drone works on the same idea, with paint fed through a hose. Photo: Shreesha Sharma / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Lasers are the other new tool. A laser cleaning head heats the thin layer of paint until it vaporizes and leaves the stone or brick underneath intact, with no water or solvent running into drains. Newcastle used lasers on its Town Moor graffiti wall and then coated the stone so later tags wipe off. Brighton and Hove City Council said in March 2026 that it was buying laser cleaning equipment for its own buildings, and on 28 September the BBC reported lasers vaporizing graffiti on a Brighton street that residents had called awful. These lasers are still handheld, so a worker guides every pass.

Laser cleaning of the marble facade of the US Supreme Court building, 2012. Photo: Architect of the Capitol via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Guiding a tool along a surface for hours is the kind of task industrial robots already do in factories, and ABB sells the parts in other industries. Its IRB 5500 paint robot sprays car bodies, and ABB PixelPaint uses it to apply two tone designs and artwork without masking tape, which ABB showed by painting an art car in 2022. ABB does not sell a graffiti robot, and public sources show none of its arms working on city walls. A setup would likely pair a mobile base with an arm carrying a laser head or a fine paint nozzle, programmed and tested first in RobotStudio. Our post on ABB paint robots from car booths to home walls covers the painting side.

An ABB IRB 5500 paint robot with PixelPaint over Illusorr's finished design on the art car, 2022. Photo: ABB

Where graffiti removal machines go next

For cities, the next useful step is software that finds tags and plans the cleanup. In October 2026 the City of Dayton, Ohio asked residents to tell it where unwanted graffiti should be removed, which is still a manual reporting loop. A van with cameras could map tags along a route, match the wall color and send a drone or an arm to the right spot. Washington's trial also shows the limits. Drones there need licensed pilots and cannot fly over active traffic lanes, so many highway sites would still need a crew on the ground or a robot on wheels.

A graffiti removal van on London's South Bank, 2007. Photo: redazadi / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Homes are a smaller market, though a real one. A homeowner with a tagged garden wall or garage door today calls a cleaning firm, or rents a pressure washer and hopes the paint does not leave a ghost. A small cobot on a cart, such as ABB's GoFa CRB 15000, which stops when it senses contact with a person, could one day carry a nozzle along a fence for a cleaning company. Nobody has shown this with a GoFa so far, so treat it as an idea. The open questions are cost, since a cobot and its tooling cost far more than a pressure washer, and the safety of passers by around lasers and high pressure water.

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

People will stay in this work for a long time. A new Nottingham scheme will have vandals help clean graffiti, the BBC reported on 30 September, and most removal anywhere is still brushes, solvent and paint. A robot cell for graffiti would need operators who can plan tool paths on a FlexPendant or a laptop, set laser power for each surface and judge when a wall is too old or fragile to touch. Those skills come straight from factory paint shops. A painter who learned path planning on car bodies would already know most of what a graffiti cell asks for.

Programming a GoFa cobot from the FlexPendant touch screen. Photo: ABB

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