Home Insulation Robot: From Loft Rolls to ABB Arms

Most of the homes people will live in by 2050 are already standing, and many of them lose heat through their floors, walls and roofs. Adding insulation to an old house usually means lifting boards, putting up scaffolding or sending someone into a damp crawl space, and a home insulation robot tries to avoid that. This post covers how insulation was fitted by hand, how blowing machines and spray foam changed the job, how Q-Bot's small robots started spraying foam under UK floors, and where factory robots, ABB arms among them, could help retrofit homes in large numbers.

A worker in a protective suit blows loose insulation into an attic through a long hose. Photo: USFWS Mountain Prairie via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

From slag wool to loft rolls laid by hand

Man-made insulation was a factory hazard before it was a home product. In 1840 Edward Parry made slag wool in Wales, but the loose fibres drifted around the works and harmed the men so badly that he dropped the process. John Player patented a way to make mineral wool in the United States in 1870, and commercial production began in 1871 at Georgsmarienhütte in Germany. In 1933 Games Slayter, then at Owens-Illinois in Toledo, Ohio, applied for a patent on the modern glass wool process. Builders now had rolls and batts they could cut to size.

An installer in a mask and gloves lays glass wool insulation batts by hand, 2002. Photo: Tracey Nicholls, CSIRO / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

Fitting them stayed manual. An installer in a mask and overalls kneels between ceiling joists, unrolls the batts and pushes them into place, usually in a dusty, cramped loft. Mineral fibres irritate the eyes, skin and lungs, so the protective suit became part of the job. The next step was blowing loose fill. Cavity walls came back into wide use in the UK in the 1920s, and filling the cavity with insulation became standard in the 1970s. Installers drill small holes in the outer brick skin and blow fibre or beads in through a hose.

A hose feeds insulation into a brick cavity wall through holes drilled in the outer skin. Photo: Workworkwembley / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Floors were harder. Many older UK homes have suspended timber floors over a shallow void, and the usual fix meant lifting floorboards, moving furniture and crawling underneath. The EU-funded Q-Bot project built a small robotic device for that space. It goes in through a small opening and sends video to an operator holding a gamepad. It maps the void in 3D, then sprays polyurethane foam, certified by the British Board of Agrément, onto the underside of the boards. CORDIS reported that the demonstrator insulated floors in 120 homes in the UK and France.

Spray foam insulation being applied between timber studs, the kind of foam Q-Bot's robots spray under floors. Photo: Cdpweb161 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Spray robots and prefab skins in retrofits now

Q-Bot now says it has insulated more than 5,500 homes, and that over 8 million UK homes have suspended floors. It installs either robotically or by hand, and most jobs take one to two days. Walls come next. On 13 October 2026, EP Magazine reported that Syracuse University had won a multiyear award from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority to develop 3D printed concrete siding panels for home retrofits. Robots will help install the panels, with Construction Robotics advising on that part, and the team plans a full-scale retrofit of a campus dormitory.

A crane lifts a factory made Energiesprong facade panel onto a house in Longueau, France, 2018. Photo: Energiesprong International / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Wrapping an old house in a new skin has been tried at scale before. The Dutch government started the Energiesprong programme in 2010. Teams laser scan the outside of a building, turn the scan into a building model and make insulated panels in a factory, so the work on site takes less than a week. More than 5,000 Dutch homes have been retrofitted this way, and the first ten UK homes followed in 2018. Industrial robots suit this kind of work best, because the panels are cut, assembled and checked under one roof before the crane arrives.

An ABB robot assembling timber building parts in an AUAR micro-factory. Photo: ABB

ABB robots already work in that kind of factory. In 2024 ABB Robotics announced a collaboration with the UK start-up AUAR, whose robotic micro-factories build energy-efficient homes from sheet timber, and ABB Robotics & Automation Ventures joined AUAR's £2.6 million seed round. An ABB IRB 6700 has printed the concrete walls of the German Red Cross headquarters in Warendorf-Beckum. I found no source showing an ABB robot spraying insulation in a home. ABB paint robots such as the IRB 5500 do spray coatings along programmed paths, which is close to applying foam to a panel, so that use is a possibility for now.

An ABB IRB 6700 printing the walls of the German Red Cross headquarters in Warendorf-Beckum. Photo: ABB

Where insulation robots go next

The Syracuse team points to about 5.3 million single-family homes in New York, more than half of them built before 1960, and says it wants to ease labour shortages and make the work safer. In homes, the near future probably means more small robots for places people should not have to crawl into, such as floor voids and lofts, driven by a trained installer who checks the result. In factories, it means panel lines where robots cut boards, add insulation and fit windows before the panel leaves the plant.

Terraced homes in Nottingham after an Energiesprong retrofit with new insulated facades and solar roofs, 2019. Photo: Energiesprong International / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Factory-made wall and roof elements are where ABB's current arms make the most sense. For the DFAB HOUSE at ETH Zurich, researchers used ABB robots on a gantry to assemble timber modules, and the same kind of arm could add insulation layers or membranes to prefab panels. Every old house is different, so every panel is too, and the robot paths have to come from the building scan instead of a fixed program. Teams usually build and test those paths in RobotStudio before touching a real panel, as our post on home building microfactories describes.

ABB robots assembling a timber frame module for the DFAB HOUSE at ETH Zurich. Photo: Gramazio Kohler Research, ETH Zurich / ABB

Cost, trust and skills are still open problems. A robot visit has to cost less than lifting floors or scaffolding a wall, and grant schemes often decide whether a family can afford either one. Foam and panels have to handle moisture and ventilation, or a warmer house can turn damp. Installers will need to learn to drive, check and maintain robots, and cobots such as ABB's GoFa CRB 15000 let a person teach an arm by moving it by hand. For the next few years the installer stays in charge, with robots taking over the worst crawl spaces.

Lead through teaching: a person moves an ABB GoFa CRB 15000 arm by hand to show it a task. Photo: ABB

Innovation

AI solutions for effortless ABB robot control.

Automation

Robotics

ceojohntran@chatwithrobot.net

+84905311611

© 2025. All rights reserved.

qtran1215@gmail.com