ABB Cobots and Learning to Live With Robots Long Term

From fenced ASEA robots to UT Austin's new $30M NSF center on human-robot co-adaptation: what ABB's GoFa shows about robots that share space with people.

INDUSTRIAL ROBOTICS

Chat With Robot

9/23/20261 min read

For decades robots and people were kept apart on purpose. ASEA, the Swedish company that later became part of ABB, sold its first electric IRB 6 in 1974, and robots like it worked behind fences. If a person stepped into the cell, the robot stopped.

Row of orange ASEA and ABB industrial robot arms in a museum room
Row of orange ASEA and ABB industrial robot arms in a museum room

Early ASEA and ABB industrial robots, including the IRB 6, on display. Photo: Dependability / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Fences still guard most heavy industrial robots today. Around 2000, researchers began studying robots meant to be around people. MIT's Kismet tried to read faces and react to them, and later robots like Pepper greeted people in shops and airports. Most of those studies lasted minutes or days, far shorter than a real working life.

Yellow industrial robot stacking boxes on a pallet inside a guarded area
Yellow industrial robot stacking boxes on a pallet inside a guarded area

An industrial palletizing robot working behind guarding in a warehouse. Photo: Killgore1138 / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

On August 27, the University of Texas at Austin said it will lead a new $30 million NSF center on human and robot co-adaptation. Over five years, 39 researchers from six universities will study how people and robots adjust to each other in homes, dormitories, hospitals, assisted-living sites, cafés and a museum.

Metal robot head with large eyes, eyebrows and red lips on a stand
Metal robot head with large eyes, eyebrows and red lips on a stand

Kismet, MIT's expressive robot head from around 2000, now in the MIT Museum. Photo: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5)

ABB has built its cobots around that closeness. GoFa has force sensing in every joint, stops when it touches a person, and can be guided by hand to learn a task, which is the kind of back-and-forth the Texas researchers want to study over months instead of minutes.

White humanoid Pepper robot wearing a cap with a tablet on its chest
White humanoid Pepper robot wearing a cap with a tablet on its chest

A Pepper robot greeting travellers at Prague airport. Photo: Benoît Prieur / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

ABB's healthcare research hub in Houston develops hospital lab automation with robots like GoFa and YuMi working next to lab staff. Long-term studies like the new center's could show which of those habits last: whether people start trusting the arm more, get bored of it, or change how they work around it.

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

ABB's GoFa can be guided by hand and senses contact through its joints. Photo: ABB

The home robot I'd actually want is one that notices how a family's routine changes over a year and adjusts without being reprogrammed. Five years of real homes and hospitals should give robot makers, ABB included, better evidence for how to build that.

Grey ABB GoFa cobot in a lab next to laboratory equipment under an ABB healthcare sign
Grey ABB GoFa cobot in a lab next to laboratory equipment under an ABB healthcare sign

A GoFa cobot at ABB's healthcare research hub. Photo: ABB

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