Robot Photographer: From Photo Booths to ABB Arms

A robot photographer is any machine that frames and takes a picture with no person behind the camera. The idea is older than it sounds: coin photo booths did it a hundred years ago, and a university robot was taking snapshots at a conference in 2002. Today camera arms swing around guests on red carpets and at trade fairs. This post follows the job from the portrait studio to the photo booth, looks at the robots photographing people now, from small home camera robots to industrial arms, and asks where ABB robots could fit and what still holds the idea back.

A Glambot camera robot on a Bolt arm at a trade fair in Germany, 2023. Photo: Derakkuschrauber / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From head rests to coin photo booths

Early portraits took patience. Richard Beard opened the first daguerreotype portrait studio on the roof of the Regent Street Polytechnic in London around 1841. Even after the faster Petzval lens arrived that year, a camera maker's instructions asked for 40 to 45 seconds in direct sun and up to two minutes in shade. Sitters had to keep still, so studios used head rests on stands behind the chair, placed so they did not show in the picture. The photographer did everything by hand: posing the sitter, judging the light, uncapping the lens and developing the plate.

A photographer's studio in Berlin, Wisconsin, in 1893, with a head rest stand behind the sitter's chair. Photo: A. H. Wheeler via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Inventors soon tried to take the photographer out of the room. William Pope and Edward Poole of Baltimore filed a patent for an automatic photography machine in 1888, and a working machine by the Frenchman T. E. Enjalbert was shown at the 1889 World's Fair in Paris. The breakthrough came in 1925, when Anatol Josepho opened a booth on Broadway in New York. For 25 cents it took, developed and printed eight photos in about ten minutes, and about 280,000 people used it in its first six months. In 1927 Josepho sold the rights for $1 million plus royalties.

A classic Fotoautomaat photo booth with its curtain drawn while someone sits inside. Photo: Ilkka Jukarainen / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Later booths went digital and turned into entertainment. In February 1995 Sega and Atlus launched Print Club in Japanese arcades, the first purikura sticker photo machine, and by 1997 around 45,000 of them were in use. Mobile robots came from research. Lewis, built by William Smart and Cindy Grimm at Washington University in St. Louis, was billed by the university as the world's first robotic photographer and appeared at the SIGGRAPH conference in Austin in July 2002. The five foot, 300 pound robot rolled through a reception and took hundreds of photos of guests, and it later worked a wedding reception while a professional handled the posed shots.

Two people inside a purikura sticker photo booth with large round lights in Osaka, 2007. Photo: Syced / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Camera robots at events and at home today

Weddings and events are still shot mostly by human photographers, but robots have found two niches. On red carpets, the GlamBOT that director Cole Walliser has run for E! since 2016 swings a high speed camera on a Bolt arm around each celebrity and records at about 1,000 frames a second for a slow motion clip. Similar camera arms are now offered for parties and trade fairs. At home the trend is small and mobile. TechRadar tested Beni from Mondo Robotics in September 2026, a wheeled camera robot that follows people and dogs, reaches 17.9 mph, jumps obstacles of about ten inches and rights itself after a fall. It launched on Kickstarter in July at $549, against a planned $799 retail price.

A wedding photographer kneels to photograph a bride and her family on a lawn. Photo: Daniel Case / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Industrial robot arms have carried cameras for years. ABB arms have moved and panned cameras on film sets, a story told in our post on motion control camera robots. In June 2017 Porsche used two camera-equipped ABB IRB 4600 robots to present a gold limited edition 911 in a glass box outside the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart. For a month, online visitors booked time slots and steered the cameras around the car themselves. Each visitor chose the angle from a browser while the robot did the moving.

Two camera-equipped ABB IRB 4600 robots around a gold Porsche 911 in the glass box outside the Porsche Museum, Stuttgart, 2017. Photo: ABB

Among guests, a collaborative arm is the safer choice for a robot photographer. ABB's GoFa CRB 15000 is built to work next to people and stops when it senses contact, and it can be taught by moving the arm by hand. A GoFa holding a camera on a stand at an event, running a short programmed move around each guest, is a realistic setup, although we found no ABB event photography product. ABB robots have appeared in public shows before: a YuMi conducted the Lucca Philharmonic with Andrea Bocelli in Pisa in 2017.

ABB's YuMi conducts the Lucca Philharmonic with Andrea Bocelli in Pisa, 2017. Photo: ABB

Where robot photographers go next

Product photography may turn out to be a bigger market than portraits. Online shops need the same angles and lighting for thousands of items, and a robot can repeat a camera path to the millimetre while a turntable spins the product. Moves like these are usually planned and checked in RobotStudio before they run, and teaching by hand on a cobot can be fast enough for a small studio. Event booths could follow the same pattern: a set path, a trigger from the guest, and pictures sent straight to a phone, much as the digital booths in train stations already print photos on the spot.

Lead-through teaching: moving an ABB GoFa arm by hand. Photo: ABB

At home, camera robots are likely to stay small. Phone gimbals already track a face, and robots like Beni add wheels so the camera can follow a child or a dog through a garden. A home robot arm with a camera, perhaps on a future household helper, could frame family photos without anyone standing behind it. All of these depend on software that recognises people and decides when a moment is worth a picture.

A Glambot Event Pro camera robot set up on a red carpet for an outdoor event. Photo: TaurusEmerald / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The hard parts are cost, safety, privacy and taste. A fast camera arm with lighting and software costs far more than hiring a photographer for an evening, so it works where many guests pass in a short time. Fast arms near crowds need barriers or speed limits, which is why cobots with force sensing, or safety zones set with SafeMove on industrial arms, matter for events. A robot that films at home raises the question of who sees the footage. Then there is composition. A robot repeats a move perfectly, yet picking the moment and the pose is still what people pay a photographer for.

A wedding photographer frames a bride posing against a sandstone cliff. Photo: Mike Baird / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

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