Mobile Manipulator: From Fixed Cells to ABB Lab Robots

A mobile manipulator is a robot arm mounted on a mobile platform, so the robot can drive to the work. For decades industry kept the two halves apart. Arms stayed bolted inside cells, and carts and later AMRs did the moving. This post traces how that split began with the first Unimate and the first wire-guided carts, and why early arms on wheels stayed in research labs for so long. Then it looks at the mobile manipulator's move into warehouses and clinical labs, including ABB's new work with Roche, and at what still holds it back.

An ER-FLEX mobile manipulator from Enabled Robotics, a UR16e cobot mounted on a MiR250 mobile robot. Photo: Auledas / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

How robot arms stayed bolted down while carts learned to drive

The industrial robot started out fixed in place. George Devol filed the patent behind the Unimate in 1954, and in 1961 the first one went to work on a General Motors line at the Inland Fisher Guide Plant in Ewing Township, New Jersey, moving die castings in a job that was dangerous for people. The machine weighed 4,000 pounds and was programmed by moving its gripper by hand and recording each position on a drum memory. That set the pattern for the robot cell: the arm stayed put, and conveyors or people brought the parts to it.

A Unimate robot pours coffee at the Biltmore Hotel, Los Angeles, 1967. Photo: Frank Q. Brown, Los Angeles Times / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Mobility arrived separately. In the 1950s Barrett Electronics of Northbrook, Illinois, brought the first automated guided vehicle to market, a tow truck that followed a wire in the floor instead of a rail. Later AGVs steered with laser scanners and reflectors, and the term autonomous mobile robot came to mean a machine that needs no extra infrastructure. Kiva Systems, started in 2003 as Distrobot by Mick Mountz, Raffaello D'Andrea and Peter Wurman, built drive units that lift shelving pods and carry them to workers. Amazon bought Kiva in 2012 for about $775 million, and in July 2025 it said it had deployed its one millionth robot.

An automated guided vehicle built on a Jungheinrich ERC 215a stacker moves a pallet in the ICE maintenance works at Cologne-Nippes, 2018. Photo: Raimond Spekking / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Putting the two halves together took decades of research. Fraunhofer's MORO appeared in 1984, LAAS-CNRS in France built Hilare 2bis in 1992, Aalborg University's Little Helper followed in 2009, and PAL Robotics' TIAGo dates from 2016. Construction tried it too. In 2016 and 2017 ETH Zurich's In situ Fabricator, a mobile construction robot, bent and welded 6 mm rebar into the mesh for a curved concrete wall at Empa's NEST DFAB HOUSE, finding its position from markers with a camera on its end effector. Industrial adoption stayed limited, and Brightpick's chief executive Jan Zizka writes that until the 2020s mobile manipulation remained largely an academic or experimental category.

ETH Zurich's In situ Fabricator, a mobile construction robot, builds a steel mesh for a curved concrete wall, 2016 to 2017. Photo: Gramazio Kohler Research, ETH Zurich (ABB press image)

Mobile manipulators in labs and warehouses today

The clearest ABB example is in hospital labs. In July 2026 ABB Robotics announced a global collaboration with Roche Diagnostics to develop robotic solutions for clinical laboratories. In Roche's central diagnostics labs, its largest testing segment, ABB will use autonomous mobile manipulators to move samples and materials between instruments, while a second track covers slide handling for Roche's pathology business. ABB is responsible for the industrial-grade lab solutions, and Roche brings its diagnostic expertise. Marc Boehm, lifecycle leader for core lab at Roche Diagnostics, said that automating repetitive tasks lets laboratory staff focus on complex analysis.

An ABB robot arm loads glass slides into a Roche VENTANA DP 200 slide scanner, from ABB's announcement of its Roche collaboration. Photo: ABB

Warehouses are the other early market. Kiva-style systems bring shelves to a person or a fixed arm at a picking station, and in a Robotics Tomorrow article this autumn Zizka argues that this wastes equipment, energy and time moving inventory back and forth. In his description, a mobile manipulator drives to the storage area, takes the right tote, picks the item there and places it in an order container. Based on its own simulations and installations, Brightpick claims two to three times the productivity per robot of goods-to-person robots. Zizka credits better AI, 3D vision and hardware, and says the economics depend on keeping the robot mechanically simple.

An Amazon drive unit on display at the company's fulfilment centre in Swindon. Units like this carry shelving pods to pickers. Photo: Auledas / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

ABB's portfolio already covers both halves. Its GoFa CRB 15000 cobots are designed to work in the presence of people, and ABB says customers need not rely on in-house programming specialists to run them. Its Flexley Mover AMRs lift and carry loads, and the P604 navigates by 3D visual SLAM to within 10 mm, building its own maps without extra infrastructure. On 13 October Invest in Spain reported that ABB Robotics will build a technology and operations centre in Sabadell, near Barcelona, combining engineering, machine vision, software and AMR teams from 2028 and supporting AMR development at its Burgos plant.

An ABB GoFa cobot on a cabinet base picks up a sample tube at a lab bench, from ABB's Roche announcement. Photo: ABB

What mobile manipulators still need to prove

Safety rules are still catching up. In September the consultancy SecuRESafe published a guide on the Association for Advancing Automation's website that maps the safety standards for humanoid and general-purpose robots, and one of its four example pathways covers general-purpose mobile manipulators in manufacturing or logistics. Its main point is that no single standard comprehensively addresses every such system, so builders have to combine standards and add engineering evidence for each intended use. Research has its own blind spot: work on mobile manipulators has tended to optimise arms and tooling one at a time rather than integrate them into applications, which helps explain the slow industrial uptake.

A PAL Robotics TIAGo++ mobile manipulator, the two-armed version of the TIAGo research robot. Photo: PAL Robotics / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

For factories, an obvious next step would be a GoFa riding on a Flexley Mover, so one arm could tend several machines or carry parts between cells. We found no ABB product that combines them, so this is a possibility. There is also a technical catch. A base that parks to within 10 mm still leaves the arm to find its workpiece precisely, and the ETH robot, for example, located itself with a camera and markers. Cells like this would be planned and tested in RobotStudio before anything moves on the shop floor. Our post on CNC machine tending shows the fixed version of the job.

ABB's concept mobile laboratory robot, a dual-arm YuMi on a mobile column, tends a centrifuge beside a lab worker, 2019. Photo: ABB

Homes are further off. Hello Robot sells Stretch 4, a 46 kg robot with a mobile base and an arm that lifts 2.5 kg at full reach, and describes it as ready to work in the home or the workplace. Its chief executive, Aaron Edsinger, told A3 in October that the company is "very pragmatic about what we can actually do", and that getting robots to work in an environment like the home is still challenging. Cost is the other brake. Zizka notes that six-axis arms, grippers and sensors were long too expensive and hard to maintain at scale. For skills, ABB points to GoFa, which it designed for users without programming specialists.

An ABB GoFa cobot with a camera and gripper lifts a sample tube from a rack, from ABB's Roche announcement. Photo: ABB

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