Curling Robot: From Frozen Ponds to ABB Arms

Curling looks slow on television, but every throw depends on a few grams of force, a quarter turn of the wrist and ice that changes from one end to the next. Researchers like it as a test for machines for that reason: a curling robot has to read the ice, choose a shot and release a granite stone of nearly 20 kg at exactly the right speed and spin. This post goes from stones thrown on Scottish ponds to the Curly robot from Korea University and the six-legged robot at the Beijing Games, then looks at what ABB robots could do around the sport, from stone making to repeatable test throws.

Curling sheets at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy. Photo: Gianantonio100 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How curling grew from frozen ponds to granite stones

The oldest known curling stone carries the date 1511. It was found, with another dated 1551, when an old pond was drained at Dunblane in Scotland, and both are now in the Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum. The first written mention of a contest with stones on ice comes from the records of Paisley Abbey in February 1541. Early players used flat stones from rivers and fields, with no handle and no standard size, so the curl and speed of a throw owed much to luck. Some early stones had holes for a finger and thumb.

An old curling stone with an iron handle, covered in moss. Photo: Rosser1954 via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Rules and better stones came slowly. Kilsyth Curling Club says it was formally constituted in 1716. The Grand Caledonian Curling Club, founded in 1838 and later the Royal Caledonian, wrote what the International Olympic Committee accepts as the first official rules. In Darvel, weavers played with the stone weights from their looms fitted with removable handles, and curlers in central Canada used irons until the early 1900s. Kays of Scotland has made curling stones in Mauchline, Ayrshire, since 1851 and holds the rights to granite from the island of Ailsa Craig.

The curling stone quarries on Ailsa Craig, the island whose granite Kays of Scotland uses. Photo: Rosser1954 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Machines entered the game first as aids and judges. Wheelchair curling began in Europe in the late 1990s and became a Paralympic sport at Turin in 2006. Its players throw from a stationary chair, with no sweeping, and may push the stone with a delivery stick, a pole with a bracket that fits over the handle. In top competition the stone itself became a sensor. The electronic handle called Eye on the Hog shows whether a player let go before the hog line, and it is mandatory at high level national and international events, although its cost keeps it out of most clubs.

A wheelchair curling team prepares a shot in 2010; players throw from a stationary chair. Photo: Scazon / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Curling robots and rule fights in 2026

On 3 September 2026 The Canadian Press reported that Curling Canada will use the World Curling rulebook this season, including an explicit ban on touching the granite of a stone after it is in play. The change follows the 2026 Winter Olympics, where Sweden's Oskar Eriksson accused Canada's Marc Kennedy of touching a stone after release, and an umpire later removed a stone thrown by Rachel Homan for the same reason. The hog line handle cannot see a fingertip on the granite, so those calls still depend on people and video.

Denni Neufeld delivers a stone at the Elite 10 event in 2018 while teammates wait to sweep. Photo: Krazytea / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Playing the throw itself is a different problem. Korea University demonstrated Curly in public on 8 March 2018 at the Korea Paralympic Committee's Icheon training centre, in a match against students from Chuncheon Machinery Industry High School. Curly has two parts. A skip robot uses cameras to read where all the stones lie, and a thrower robot drives down the ice, turns the stone and lets it go. In 2020 Dong-Ok Won, Klaus-Robert Müller and Seong-Whan Lee reported in Science Robotics that Curly won three of four official games against human teams, using reinforcement learning that adapts as the ice changes during a match.

A granite curling stone on display outside the Kays of Scotland works in Mauchline. Photo: Richard Dorrell / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

China took a different design to the 2022 Winter Olympics. A six-legged robot described by Gao Feng and colleagues in the journal Robot imitated a human delivery and hit a stone at the Ice Cube in Beijing. ABB does not make a curling robot, and we found no ABB arm in the sport, so the rest is a possibility. An arm such as the IRB 1300 or a GoFa cobot could give a lab a repeatable throw to test stones and ice, the way a fixed swing robot tests golf clubs in our post on golf club testing.

An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 cobot at a work table. Photo: ABB

What curling robots could do next

At the stone maker, the work is heavy and precise. Granite blocks have to be cut, shaped, polished and fitted with handles, and every stone in a set has to run the same way. ABB already sells robots for grinding and polishing hard materials, such as the IRB 6700 used in grinding cells, and a stone maker could use one for the dull and dusty parts of finishing. We found no stone maker that has done this. Any such cell would be planned and tested first in RobotStudio before a real granite stone was put on the fixture.

An ABB IRB 6700 grinding a steel part in Teqram's EasyGrinder cell at Ancofer. Photo: ABB

Rinks are another place for machines. Ice for curling is pebbled with water droplets and kept at a steady temperature, and the surface changes as stones and sweepers wear it during a game. Our post on ice resurfacing robots covers the machines that already prepare rinks. For clubs and home players, the likely next step is cheaper coaching. A camera and software that track stone speed, rotation and path could give a club curler the same feedback that Curly's skip robot used to plan its shots.

Visitors try curling in the fan zone in Milan during the 2026 Winter Olympics. Photo: Alex Sirac / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

A full curling robot is a research project, and few clubs could pay for one when even the Eye on the Hog handle is too expensive for most of them. Arms near athletes on slippery ice need speed limits and safe zones, which tools like SafeMove are built to supervise. The ice is the third problem. It changes every few ends, and Curly's team used learning that adapts during a match because a fixed program would fall behind. Sweeping is still missing too: Curly did not sweep, and in some games people swept for it.

An ABB IRB 1300 with Foundry Plus 2 protection, built to handle water and dust. Photo: ABB

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