Plant Care Robot: From Watering Cans to ABB Arms

A plant care robot takes on one of the oldest chores in any home: giving each pot the right amount of water and light, at the right time, without drowning it. This post follows that job from the watering can and the glass plant case, through wick pots and self-watering planters, to the smart indoor gardens and wheeled home robots that now water houseplants on a schedule. Along the way it looks at where ABB robots, which were built for factories and labs, could plausibly fit as plant tending moves from the windowsill into offices, nurseries and automated growing rooms.

A Click & Grow smart herb garden with its own grow light, growing flowers and herbs indoors. Photo: Priitpedastsaar / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How people kept houseplants alive before machines

For most of history, plant care meant carrying water by hand. The watering can has been in use since at least AD 79. The name itself first shows up in writing in 1692; before that people called it a watering pot. In 1886 John Haws patented a can that he said was much easier to carry and tip than anything sold before it. The routine around the can hardly changed for centuries. Someone looked at the soil, pushed a finger into it and decided whether the plant needed a drink, then did the same at the next pot.

Watering a vegetable garden by hand with a metal watering can, 2025. Photo: Palmolley / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The first real step toward hands-off care came from a London doctor. Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward found that a fern had sprouted inside a sealed glass bottle and kept growing for years without any watering. He had a carpenter build a closely fitted glazed case, and in 1842 he published On the Growth of Plants in Closely Glazed Cases. A Wardian case recycled its own moisture, so tender plants could survive long sea voyages and smoky city air with almost no attention. It is the ancestor of the modern terrarium and, in a loose sense, of every sealed smart garden on a kitchen counter.

A Wardian case at the Chelsea Physic Garden in London, the glazed box Nathaniel Ward designed to keep plants alive with little watering. Photo: Daderot / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

The next idea was to let the pot water itself from below. A sub-irrigated planter holds a reservoir under the soil, and a wick or a column of soil draws water upward by capillary action, so the plant takes what it needs. Professional landscapers took to these planters for buildings and city sites because the watering could be automated. Their weak point is that salts cannot be flushed out and build up over time. Timers, drip lines and cheap moisture sensors came later, and together they are the first parts of what would become a plant care robot.

A simple soil moisture meter pushed into the ground, the kind of cheap sensor that later fed automatic watering. Photo: Sealman / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Smart gardens and home robots that water houseplants now

Machines have been able to water a plant for decades, so the open question now is whether a general home robot should do it. On 29 September 2026 Flourish Robots of San Francisco launched Flourish 1, a $3,555 wheeled home robot that owners teach by demonstrating a task with their phone. Its maker lists watering plants next to loading the dishwasher, wiping tables and picking up shoes and toys. In a Live Science reader poll published on 15 September, 42 percent of more than 600 readers said they would hand their chores to a humanoid robot. One doubtful commenter wrote that robots might at least be able to maintain houseplants.

A three-tier Click & Grow smart garden with built-in lights next to houseplants in a living room. Photo: Janar Raidla / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Before general robots like this arrived, inventors built single-purpose plant robots. In 2018 Vincross put a potted plant on its six-legged HEXA robot so it could walk into sunlight and back into shade, and MIT Media Lab researchers showed Elowan, a plant wired by electrodes to a wheeled base that drove toward light. The University of Bonn's household service robot Cosero has been photographed watering a potted plant with an ordinary can. Indoor hydroponic gardens with LED lights, pumps and app reminders now sit on plenty of kitchen counters. They handle water and light inside a closed box, much as Ward's case did, but a person still has to plant, prune and harvest.

Cosero, a household service robot from the University of Bonn, watering a plant. Photo: Sven Behnke / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB has not announced a home plant care robot, so any role for its machines here is a possibility. Some of the parts are already in its range. The GoFa CRB 15000 cobot has torque sensors in its joints that let it work next to people and stop on contact, and it can be taught by moving the arm by hand. The dual-arm YuMi IRB 14000 was designed for small, careful handling such as lab samples. A greenhouse bench or an office plant wall tended by an arm like these would usually be planned and tested first in RobotStudio before any water is poured.

ABB's dual-arm YuMi IRB 14000 handling small parts beside a lab worker. Photo: ABB

Where robotic plant tending is heading

In homes, plant care will probably arrive as one skill among many on general robots, with fewer stand-alone watering gadgets. A robot that already maps the living room can carry a small can to each pot, read a soil sensor and log what it did. The hard parts are ordinary ones. Pots sit on high shelves and in tight corners, leaves hide the soil, and a spill on a wooden floor costs more than a dry fern. Price matters too, because a $3,555 robot has to earn its place with a long list of chores.

An indoor FarmBot, an open-source gantry robot that plants and waters a tray of seedlings under lamps. Photo: FarmBot / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Businesses are an easier case. Offices, hotels and malls pay staff or contractors to water large plant walls and atriums, and plant nurseries handle huge numbers of pots. A mobile robot or a fixed arm could follow a set route there, water according to sensor readings and use a camera to flag yellowing leaves. ABB's GoFa, or a Flexley Mover AMR carrying a small arm, could plausibly fit that kind of route. Readers who want to see how ABB arms already work outside car plants can find examples in ABB robot use cases. Tools that let staff teach a route without code would matter as much as the arm.

ABB's Flexley Mover P604 moves loads around a site without fixed tracks. Photo: ABB

A few open problems will decide how fast the plant care robot spreads. Robots have to judge plant health from leaves and soil, which is harder than reading a moisture number, and they have to do it safely around children, pets and furniture. Cost has to come down. Owners also need a simple way to set up each new plant, the kind of setup covered in our post on no-code robot programming. Nathaniel Ward wanted plants that could look after themselves while their owners were busy, and in 1842 a sealed glass box was as far as he could take it.

ABB's GoFa cobot being taught by hand, with no code typed. Photo: ABB

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