Home Security Robot Patrols: Lessons From ABB

A home security robot is supposed to do what a night watchman once did: walk the property, notice what is out of place and raise the alarm. The idea is old, but the hardware for it is new. This post follows the job from watchmen and guard dogs to closed circuit cameras, then to the wheeled and four-legged patrol robots now being tested in apartment blocks and by police forces. It also looks at the navigation tech ABB already ships in its Flexley Mover robots, and at what still has to be solved before a patrol robot makes sense in an ordinary house.

A museum night watchman and his dog in front of Rembrandt's The Night Watch in Amsterdam, between 1920 and 1939. Photo: Unknown photographer / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

From lantern rounds to the first camera doorbell

For most of history, security meant a person awake at night. Cities hired watchmen who walked set rounds with a lantern and a rattle or a bell, calling the hour and checking doors. London relied on parish watchmen until the Metropolitan Police took over in 1829. Farms, warehouses and big houses added dogs, which hear and smell far better than any guard and cost little to keep. The weakness was the same everywhere: one person can only be in one place, and a tired watchman on a cold night misses things, and most later inventions were attempts to get around that.

A night watchman in Peking, photographed by John Thomson around 1871. Photo: John Thomson via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Cameras were the first answer. In 1942 Siemens installed a closed circuit television system at Peenemünde so engineers could watch V-2 rocket launches from a safe distance, a setup credited to the engineer Walter Bruch. The home version came from Queens, New York. Marie Van Brittan Brown and her husband Albert filed a patent in 1966 for a system with a motorized camera that looked through peepholes at different heights, a monitor inside the house, two way audio and a remote door lock. The patent was granted in 1969, and later camera doorbells follow much the same plan.

A pole mounted CCTV camera watching a street corner in Cardiff. Photo: Jaggery / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Cameras still needed someone watching the screen, so the next step was a machine that could move and decide what to look at. Knightscope, a startup founded in 2013 in Silicon Valley, put its egg shaped K5 robot into parking lots and office campuses, where it rolled set routes and streamed video to human guards. The early years were bumpy. In 2017 a K5 at a Washington, D.C. office complex drove into a fountain, and the photos went around the world. For homes, Amazon launched its Astro robot in 2021 as a rolling camera that could check rooms while the owner was away.

A Knightscope K5 security robot on display in 2014, a year after the company was founded. Photo: JD Lasica / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Patrol robots in Singapore, Seoul and the factory aisle

The news this autumn shows where the interest is now. On 30 September 2026 Singapore's Home Team Science and Technology Agency opened the Home Team Humanoid Robotics Centre, a 29,000 square foot site for mock ups, motion capture and teleoperation. Minister Edwin Tong said the goal is to have the first humanoid robot working alongside officers in a real operational setting by 2028. The four tasks being studied are hazardous material handling, post blast scenes, searching prison cells for contraband and restocking ambulances. Those are dangerous or dull jobs, which is where security robots have always been easiest to justify.

Three Knightscope K5 robots and a K1 pillar unit on patrol duty in a parking lot. Photo: Votpuske / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Residential patrols are moving faster than humanoids. In August 2026 LG CNS signed a deal with the manager of Tower Palace, a large apartment complex in southern Seoul, to put four legged security robots on patrol. The robot is the M20 Pro from China's DEEP Robotics, running LG CNS's PhysicalWorks platform. It walks common areas and underground parking, is trained on the site layout and routes, and alerts managers when it sees something abnormal such as a fall or a fire. Staff can talk through the robot with two way voice. Operations were planned to start in the fourth quarter after about two months of testing.

A Boston Dynamics Spot quadruped in LKAB colours, Almedalen, Sweden, 2023. Four legged robots like this are now tested for building patrols. Photo: Tore Danielsson / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB does not sell a security robot, but its Flexley Mover P604 handles the hardest part of patrolling: knowing where it is. Since 2025 the P604 has used 3D Visual SLAM, which builds a map from camera images and locates the robot within about 10 mm, with no floor tape or reflectors. Each robot can share its map with the rest of the fleet, and ABB's AMR Studio software is used to set up routes. ABB built it for busy plants where pallets and people move around all day. Adding cameras or gas sensors to a mover like this for night rounds in a plant is a plausible extension, though ABB has not announced it. These robots are usually planned and tested first in RobotStudio before they run on site.

An ABB Flexley Mover P604 among wooden pallets; it finds its way with 3D Visual SLAM. Photo: ABB

What a patrol robot needs before it moves in at home

In factories and warehouses the case is fairly simple. Sites already run mobile robots on night shifts, the floors are flat and the routes are known, so a robot that notices a blocked fire door or a pallet left in an aisle on its way past adds value without new hardware. At home the problem is different. Stairs, rugs, pets and closed doors stop most wheeled robots, and a fixed camera at the door or in the hallway already covers a lot for far less money. A home patrol robot has to do something the camera cannot, like checking that the stove is off or that a window really closed.

A Ring video doorbell, the modern descendant of the 1966 camera door system. Photo: Amin / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

That points toward robots that can move and also touch things. ABB has shown a mobile YuMi concept, a dual arm robot on a wheeled base meant for hospital labs, and similar mobile arms could one day close a door or flip a switch during a patrol. Safety is the reason ABB cobots such as GoFa limit their force and speed and stop when they sense contact. A robot rolling around a sleeping household needs the same limits, plus clear rules on who sees its video. We covered that side in our post on home robot privacy.

ABB's mobile YuMi concept, a dual arm robot on a wheeled base, in a hospital lab corridor. Photo: ABB

Cost and trust are the open questions. Quadruped patrol robots still cost far more than a camera system, and Amazon pulled its business version of Astro in 2024, which shows how hard the market is. Owners also need to know what the robot records, where the data goes and what happens if someone takes control of it. The likely order is the one Singapore and Seoul are following: first shared buildings, car parks and industrial sites with professional operators, then smaller and cheaper robots for single homes once the navigation and safety rules have been proven there and the price has come down.

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

Innovation

AI solutions for effortless ABB robot control.

Automation

Robotics

ceojohntran@chatwithrobot.net

+84905311611

© 2025. All rights reserved.

qtran1215@gmail.com