Robotic Luggage Storage: From Bell Desks to ABB's Yobot

Most hotels still keep guests' bags the old way. A porter takes your suitcase, hands you a paper ticket and puts the case on a shelf in a back room. Robotic luggage storage replaces that room with a machine that takes the bag, files it in a locker and hands it back when you show a code. This post looks at how hotels and stations handled bags before robots, at the ABB robot that has stored suitcases in a Manhattan hotel lobby since 2011, at the smart lockers and bag stores spreading in 2026, and at where ABB robots could fit next.

A bellboy wheels a trolley of guests' luggage through the lobby of the Hong Kong Disneyland Hotel, 2009. Photo: Helloahappysa / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

From bellhops to left-luggage tickets

Carrying bags has been a hotel job for well over a century. The word bellhop was first recorded in 1897. It comes from the desk clerk ringing a bell to summon a porter, who would hop to attention and take instructions. Bellhops opened doors, moved luggage and walked guests to their rooms, often for a tip. The luggage was heavy. Until the Second World War most travellers used chests and trunks made of wood or other heavy materials, often shipped by professional movers. Lighter suitcases that one person could carry only took over after the war.

Guests' luggage piled at the luggage depot on the lanai of the Volcano House hotel in Hawaii, around the 1920s. Photo: Joseph Mattingly, Los Angeles Steamship Company via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

When guests arrived early or left late, their bags went into a storeroom, and the method was the same as a theatre coat check. The bag got a numbered ticket, the guest kept the matching stub, and a member of staff found the bag again later. Railway stations ran the same service on a bigger scale in left-luggage offices. Cloakrooms at major Indian railway stations still keep passengers' bags for set periods, and some of the bigger ones are staffed around the clock. Coin lockers at stations later took over part of the job for travellers with smaller bags.

The left-luggage office at Praha-Smíchov railway station in Prague. Photo: ŠJů / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The first robot to take over a hotel storeroom arrived in New York in 2011. When Yotel opened its 669-cabin hotel near Times Square that June, the lobby had a glass enclosure holding YOBOT, an ABB IRB 6640, a model more often used for material handling, machine tending or spot welding. It runs on a 5 metre floor track in front of 117 lockers stacked almost to the 14 foot ceiling, and its 3 metre reach lets it get to every locker from the track. Guests type a name and PIN, place their bag in a bin held out on the robot's fork, and get a bar-coded receipt. Storing or fetching a bag takes 30 seconds or less.

The Yotel building at 10th Avenue and 42nd Street in Manhattan in 2011, the year its YOBOT went into service. Photo: JasonParis / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Yobot, smart lockers and bag hotels in 2026

The integrator was MFG Automation of Ashford, Connecticut, an ABB partner that mostly builds cells for food, plastics and aerospace plants. Its owner, John Phelps, pitched the idea with an animated RobotStudio model of the cell. He later said the job was "very much like a robot in a bottle": depending on the locker, the arm had to fold itself a particular way, often with only 1.5 inches of clearance to the glass and walls. The touch screen also had to be simple enough for a guest with no training. Fifteen years on, Yotel still lists YOBOT on its technology page, and a lifestyle piece published on 1 October 2026 describes guests taking selfies with the robot while it holds their bags.

Engineers plan a robot cell in RobotStudio with an ABB large robot behind them. Photo: ABB

Most hotels will never build a glass robot vault, and the growth in 2026 is in smaller machines. On 23 September the London start-up Stasher announced £3 million (about $4 million) in funding, including £1 million from the smart locker maker Hive Box. Hive Box is supplying 100 lockers for hotels, stations, airports and tourist centres in the UK and Europe by mid-2027. Guests open a compartment with a QR code at any hour. Hive Box lockers already stand in 17 Premier Inn hotels in London, Edinburgh and Manchester, and Stasher says locker bookings are growing 108% month on month.

The luggage room at the Liseberg Grand Curiosa Hotel in Gothenburg, 2025. Photo: Kigsz / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Airports are going bigger. Auckland Airport's terminal upgrade includes a bag store with room for 3,000 pieces of luggage, so travellers can check in bags up to 24 hours before a flight, and construction of a new baggage system with RFID-tagged carrier trays began in late September. Emirates said in September that it plans robots that recognise passengers by face, weigh and tag their bags and carry them away. As far as public sources show, Yobot is still ABB's only robotic luggage store in a hotel. For robots at reception and in hotel corridors, see our post on hotel cobots.

A smart parcel locker in Vilnius, opened with a code, May 2026. Photo: Bdx / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Where robotic luggage storage goes next

Hotels will probably end up with a mix of lockers and robots. A robot vault makes sense where many guests store bags at the same time and floor space is tight, as in a big city lobby. Lockers suit smaller hotels and apartment buildings, since they need no arm, track or enclosure. In between, a mobile robot could carry bags from the front desk to a back storeroom or straight up to a room. ABB's Flexley Mover AMRs already move loads around factories using 3D Visual SLAM, and a hotel version is a possibility that ABB does not sell today.

A service robot in the lobby of the Yotel in downtown Miami, 2022. Photo: Phillip Pessar / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

An arm like Yobot's would probably be built differently now. A collaborative robot such as the GoFa CRB 15000 can work without a full enclosure in some setups after a risk assessment, though a packed suitcase weighs more than it can lift. A large arm in the IRB 6700 class still needs a guarded cell, and ABB's SafeMove software can limit its speed and working zones inside it. The layout, reach and cycle time can all be tried in RobotStudio before anything is built, which is how Yobot's own proposal started.

An ABB IRB 6700 lifts a solar module at dhp technology, a large arm of the kind that needs a guarded cell. Photo: ABB

Throughput is the first open problem. One arm serving one hatch handles bags one by one, so a checkout rush can still create a queue at 30 seconds a bag. Hotels also have to plan for power cuts and faults, because a guest with a flight to catch cannot wait for a technician. Bags vary in size, weight and shape, and soft bags can snag. Guests get security and access at any hour, and staff make fewer trips to a cramped storeroom. Whether that justifies a robot or a wall of lockers depends on how many bags a hotel handles each day.

An ABB Flexley Mover P603 carrying crates. Photo: ABB

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