Pinball Robot: From 1947 Flippers to ABB Arms

A pinball robot plays a real pinball table by itself: a camera above the glass follows the steel ball, and a computer fires the flippers when the ball comes down. Students and researchers have built them since at least 2004, and the game itself is drawing crowds again. Pinball Expo 2026 ran from 14 to 17 October in Schaumburg, Illinois, with free play on more than 500 machines, and Chicago got its first playable pinball museum this year. This post follows pinball from the coin games of the 1930s and the first flippers of 1947 to tables that play themselves, and looks at where ABB robots could fit.

The lit playfield of a Star Wars pinball machine, with ramps, targets and flippers. Photo: Tessa Bury / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

From penny arcades to flippers and courtroom bans

Early pinball had no flippers at all. In 1931 David Gottlieb's Baffle Ball became the first major hit of the coin-operated era and sold for $17.50, and Raymond Moloney founded Lion Manufacturing to make Ballyhoo, the game that later gave Bally its name. Players paid for a ball and could win free plays depending on a score they had no control over. On some machines a winner could press a button under the cabinet and take 50 cents instead of the free games, so police and officials across the United States argued that pinball was a slot machine in disguise.

A Gottlieb Baffle Ball, which offered 10 balls for 5 cents and had no flippers, shown at an exhibition. Photo: A7N8X / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Flippers gave players some control. Gottlieb's Humpty Dumpty of 1947 was the first machine with electromechanical flippers worked by the player, although its low-power flippers needed three pairs spread around the playfield to get the ball to the top. Genco's Triple Action was the first to use just two flippers at the bottom. The bans lasted for decades anyway. Los Angeles banned pinball machines in 1939, New York City from the early 1940s until 1976, and Chicago's ban ended in 1977. In a 1976 courtroom demonstration in New York, Roger Sharpe called out the shot he was going to make and then made it.

Pinball machines inside Currie's Ice Cream Shop on Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles, in the 1930s. Photo: Mott Studios / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Computers first took over the flippers in university labs. In 2004 a team in the University of Illinois SigArch computer architecture program fitted a 1978 Bally Star Trek table with a camera, relays and a PIC18F452 microcontroller that took flipper commands over a serial port. The camera hung above the playfield and sent 60 video fields per second to a Linux PC inside the cabinet, which ran the image processing and the AI, partly hard-coded to meet the exhibition deadline. In 2011 Adam Metcalf's master's thesis at the University of Alberta built a research framework around a Lord of the Rings machine, with real-time ball tracking filtered by a physics simulator, and called it the first attempt at a high-performance pinball-playing robot.

Relays and wiring inside the cabinet of an electromechanical pinball machine. Photo: BPX-web / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Pinball robots, fast vision and the factories behind the tables

In 2020 Kennesaw State University students Tyler Gragg, Kevin Kamperman, Cody Meier and Omar Salazar Lima built an autonomous pinball machine as their senior design project. An Arduino Mega handles the inputs and outputs, a computer running the Robot Operating System does the higher-level control, and an overhead camera tracks the ball and calculates its position. When the ball enters a tunable "flip zone", the right flipper fires. Pinball has also reached AI research. In July 2026 Anthropic researchers added TwinFlipper, a simulated task based on pinball machines, to a robotics test for language models, and every model they tried did poorly when it had to work the flippers directly.

The underside of a Judge Dredd pinball machine, showing its solenoids and wiring. Photo: Mbrickn / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Stern Pinball builds its games in Elk Grove Village, Illinois, and its business has grown since the pandemic. Hoodline reported that direct-to-consumer sales came to about 70 percent of Stern's business, which led the company to open an expanded plant there in 2023. A Stern game has nearly 3,500 parts, two dozen cables and half a mile of wiring, and the playfield wiring is hand-soldered because the games vibrate so much. Staff then play finished games ball after ball, looking for a light that fails, a weak flipper or a software bug. In mid-October 2026 Stern also confirmed a remastered AC/DC machine.

Players at a row of machines during Pinball Expo in 2006. Photo: Greg Dunlap / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

A pinball robot needs no arm, because the flippers are fired by solenoids that a computer can switch directly. Like a factory robot, though, it has to see a moving object and act in time. ABB's IRB 360 FlexPicker does that on packing lines. ABB says its TrueMove and QuickMove motion control lets the delta robot track fast-moving conveyor belts with high accuracy, and one Conveyor Tracking Module connects up to four robots, four conveyors and eight cameras. The same see-and-react loop runs through ABB's conveyor tracking lessons and through game robots such as our air hockey robot.

ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker delta robots picking from a conveyor at high speed. Photo: ABB

Where pinball robots could go next

Testing looks like the most practical job for a pinball-playing machine. When Popular Mechanics toured Stern's factory in 2017, staff were testing games by playing ball after ball, and a camera-and-flipper rig like the Kennesaw build could keep a new table busy for hours. An ABB arm pressing the cabinet buttons the way a player does is another possibility, although no pinball maker has announced one. ABB robots have played games in public before: at the 2019 FIRST Championship in Detroit, a dual-arm ABB YuMi was set up to play tic tac toe.

A dual-arm ABB YuMi set up to play tic tac toe at the FIRST Championship in Detroit, 2019. Photo: Stilfehler / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

At Stern most sales now go straight to consumers, and home builders are joining in. Pinball Expo 2026 had an expanded Homebrew Village with more than 45 custom games and prototypes by independent creators, and it hosted the first IFPA Digital Pinball World Championship, organized with AtGames on virtual pinball cabinets. Competition keeps growing. The International Flipper Pinball Association counted 12,693 sanctioned events in 2024, with nearly 288,000 player entries. We found pinball robots only as student and research builds, not as products a home player can buy.

A Stern AC/DC pinball machine in a home, with a Stern Metallica machine beside it, 2015. Photo: Cadillac000 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Keeping old tables alive takes people who can fix them. William Pietri, who opened The Flip in Chicago's Block 37, says few professional pinball repairers are still working, so volunteers repair his roughly 30 machines and he plans to train more. New games are expensive too: Popular Mechanics reported in 2017 that creating one costs upwards of $1 million. Language models still fail at direct flipper control. If an arm ever works beside players, it needs the safety of a cobot. ABB says its GoFa uses torque sensors to limit power and force and can work next to people without fencing, and such a test cell could be planned first in RobotStudio.

Moving an ABB GoFa cobot arm by hand. Torque sensors in its joints let it feel the push. Photo: ABB

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