ABB Paint Robots: From Car Booths to Home Walls

For most of the last century, painting a car meant a person in a booth with a spray gun. Paint shops like this 1945 British line ran on skilled hands, but the workers breathed solvent fog all shift, and the finish depended on who held the gun that day.

Workers spray car bodies in a British paint shop, 1945. Photo: Ministry of Information / IWM (public domain)

One of the first painting robots came out of a Norwegian wheelbarrow factory. Trallfa started building it in 1964 to keep workers away from toxic fumes and sold the first unit in 1969, to enamel bathtubs. ASEA bought Trallfa in 1985, and three years later that paint know-how became part of ABB.

A Trallfa paint robot at the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology. Photo: Bjoertvedt / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Today ABB's IRB 5500 FlexPainter does much of that work in car plants. Its paint equipment sits close to the wrist, so less paint and solvent are wasted at each color change. In ABB's Compact Interior Paint station, IRB 5350 opener robots swing doors and hoods open while IRB 5500s paint inside, and the booth is about a third smaller.

ABB paint robots working on car bodies in a Compact Interior Paint line. Photo: ABB

PixelPaint skips spraying altogether. An IRB 5500 carries a print head with more than 1,000 individually controlled nozzles, guided by 3D vision along paths planned in RobotStudio, so no paint drifts into the air and nothing has to be masked. Since 2025 it has printed a Maybach pattern onto hoods at Mercedes-Benz in Sindelfingen.

ABB PixelPaint printing a Maybach pattern for Mercedes-Benz in Sindelfingen. Photo: ABB

Building walls come next. A MarketsandMarkets report published August 20 values architectural painting robots at $0.17 billion this year and projects $0.43 billion by 2032. Okibo's EG7+ already sands and paints drywall up to 24 feet high on construction sites, a dusty and repetitive job.

An Okibo robot spray-painting an interior wall on a job site. Photo: Okibo

A home version would probably be smaller, maybe a cobot like ABB's GoFa on a mobile base that scans a room and paints it overnight without drop cloths. ABB doesn't sell anything like that yet, but the overspray-free print head, 3D vision and offline path planning it would need already run in car plants every day.

An ABB IRB 5500 paint robot carrying the PixelPaint print head. Photo: ABB

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