Ironing Robot: From Charcoal Irons to ABB Arms

How an ironing robot could follow charcoal pans, sad irons and steam irons, with 2026 laundry news and where ABB GoFa and Robotic Item Picker arms might help.

INDUSTRIAL ROBOTICS

Chat With Robot

10/20/20265 min read

An ironing robot is an easy wish and a hard machine. Pressing a shirt means holding soft cloth flat, finding the creases and moving a hot plate across them at the right speed, and recent coverage shows folding robots but no ironing robot on sale. This post covers how ironing went from charcoal pans to steam, what laundries and robot makers are doing in 2026, and where ABB robots such as the GoFa cobot and the Robotic Item Picker could help. ABB has no ironing product, so the ABB parts are possibilities.

A hand moving a white and purple steam iron across a pale blue striped shirt

Ironing a shirt with a modern Russell Hobbs steam iron. Photo: Colin / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

How ironing went from hot coals to steam

People have pressed cloth with heat for a very long time. Wikipedia reports that metal pans filled with hot coals were used to smooth fabric in China in the 1st century BC. The charcoal iron in the photo is a later descendant, with a box for the coals, a grate and a chimney. Heat control was guesswork, since the user judged by feel when the pan was ready. Each pass over the cloth was judged by eye and by touch, and that judgment is exactly what a robot has to learn.

Old black charcoal iron with a wooden handle, open coal box and small parts below it

A charcoal iron opened to show its box for hot coals. Photo: Vincent de Groot / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From the 17th century, sad irons were thick slabs of cast iron with a handle, heated in a fire or on a stove. A household kept several and swapped them as each cooled. The first electric flatiron was patented by Henry W. Seely on June 6, 1882. It weighed almost 15 pounds and took a long time to heat, so it did not replace the stove at once. Early electric irons also had no easy way to set the temperature, and the first thermostat controlled iron only arrived in the 1920s.

Rust brown cast iron plate stamped Dover No 62 Sad Iron on a green background

The base of a Dover No. 62 sad iron in a museum display at Newhalem, Washington. Photo: Joe Mabel / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Steam came next. In 1926 Eldec, a New York drying and cleaning company, introduced the first commercially available electric steam iron, but it was not a commercial success. In 1938 Steam-O-Matic of New York gained exclusive rights to make steam electric irons, and it was the first steam iron to become popular. Automating the pressing itself came much later. In 2004 Siemens sold the Dressman, a shirt pressing dummy that inflated with hot air inside a damp shirt, at about 1,029 euros in Germany.

Early electric iron with a wooden handle and a braided cord on a blue background

A Canadian Beauty electric iron made by the Renfrew Electric and Refrigeration Company in Ontario around 1925. Photo: Renfrew Electric and Refrigeration Co. / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Ironing robots and laundry automation in 2026

The news this autumn is about laundry in general. Wai-keung Fung of Cardiff Metropolitan University wrote in The Conversation, republished by Robohub on October 12, 2026, that no robot system can yet reliably handle the whole laundry process, which includes sorting, drying, folding and ironing. Hospitals once ran ironing rooms like the one in Gothenburg in the 1940s shown here, and today they show what the working end looks like. The Hong Kong Hospital Authority's support services centre in Tung Chung, reported by the South China Morning Post on September 29, meets about half of public hospitals' laundry needs, using X-ray sorting and robotic arms.

Black and white photo of a woman ironing at a board in a hospital attic room

An ironing room in the accommodation building of Sahlgrenska hospital, Gothenburg, in the 1940s. Photo: Sven Sjostedt / Medical History Museum Gothenburg via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Industrial laundries press flat items with machines. In the Turku plant shown here, ironer folders take sheets and cloths from feeders at the front, where staff load each item so the machine can draw it in. Humanoid and semi humanoid robots are starting on other steps. DYNA Robotics launched its DYNA 2.1 on September 29, 2026, a wheeled robot that loads washers and dryers and folds and shelves towels, and the company says it is being deployed in hotels, laundromats and restaurants. None of the coverage describes ironing, and the performance claims come from the company.

Bins of laundry in front of large ironer folder machines in a textile service plant

Ironer folders and their feeders in a textile service plant in Turku, Finland, 2008. Photo: Samuli Lintula with Turun Tekstiilihuolto Oy / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

ABB has no ironing product or documented laundry customer in the sources used here, so what follows is a possibility. ABB's Robotic Item Picker uses AI vision to grab unknown items from mixed bins, which is close to the job of pulling one tangled garment out of a laundry cart. Fast delta robots such as the IRB 360 FlexPicker pick light items from moving lines, though limp cloth is a different grasping problem. Our post on laundry and cloth handling covers the earlier steps in more detail.

Small ABB robot with a suction gripper above two picking bins

ABB's Robotic Item Picker uses AI vision to grab unknown items from mixed bins. Photo: ABB

What comes next for ironing robots

For homes the obstacles are cloth, heat and price. A shirt changes shape every time it is touched, and a hot plate beside a person needs safe limits on speed and force. A research paper in IEEE Xplore describes a humanoid robot ironing with an unmodified iron and board, using force feedback to control the iron and vision to find wrinkles. A UK startup called Effie, founded in 2015, set out to build an automated ironing machine and said in 2021 that it had been acquired by an appliance maker. No consumer product appears to have followed.

Person guiding a white ABB GoFa collaborative robot arm by hand

Lead-through teaching: moving an ABB GoFa arm by hand. Photo: ABB

In factories and laundries the likelier first step is a cobot that does the handling around a finishing machine, while people keep the quality checks. The GoFa CRB 15000 can be taught by moving the arm by hand, which suits a laundry that changes garments often, and SafeMove can monitor speed and zones when someone works next to it. Before buying anything, a plant can simulate the layout of feeders, trolleys and conveyors in RobotStudio to see whether an arm can reach everything.

Two engineers looking at a robot cell design on a laptop screen

Engineers share a robot cell design through RobotStudio Cloud. Photo: ABB

Finishing is the hardest step to automate, because creases must come out of a shape that keeps changing. Steam presses and ironer lines already do much of that work, and a robot that loads and unloads them could free staff for inspection and repairs. For a home buyer, the realistic wait is for a safe, affordable arm that can hang, steam and fold a shirt. The open questions are cost, safety around the hot plate and how well a robot can find and remove a crease on a garment it has never seen before.

Large blue laundry finishing machines in a bright industrial hall with workers

Finishing lines for flatwork and garments in a heavy duty laundry. Photo: Thatsme2 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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