Robot Refurbishment: Second Lives for ABB Robots

Robot refurbishment takes an old industrial arm that would otherwise be scrapped or left unused and puts it back to work. That is how ABB describes the purpose of its remanufacturing, and car plants and integrators now do the same. This post follows the idea from the first Unimate and ASEA's IRB 6, through the remanufacturing centers ABB runs in Ostrava, Auburn Hills and Shanghai, to refurbished robots on egg farms and retrofitted robots in a Renault plant. It ends with what a circular economy for robots still needs, from a steady supply of used units to proper records of every rebuild.

A refurbished white ABB robot in front of older orange units at one of ABB's Global Remanufacture & Workshop Repair Centers. Photo: ABB

From the first Unimate to robots with a second career

The first industrial robot, the Unimate, started work on a General Motors line at the Inland Fisher Guide plant in Ewing Township, New Jersey, in 1961. It was a hydraulic arm with five degrees of freedom that moved die castings and welded parts onto car bodies, a job that could poison workers with fumes or cost them a limb. In Europe, ASEA's IRB 6, among the first all-electric, microprocessor-controlled robots, went into production at Magnusson in Sweden in January 1974, where the first two ground and polished pipe bends. An IRB 6 now stands in the ASEA Historical Collections in Västerås, next to later IRB 2000 and IRB 3000 models.

A Unimate robot arm among the equipment of the Automated Manufacturing Research Facility at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology. Photo: NIST via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The first published report on remanufacturing, by R. Lund in 1984, described discarded products being completely taken apart in a factory, their usable parts cleaned and refurbished, and the product rebuilt to match or beat a new one in performance and expected life. Rebuilding is the older name for the same work and is still common in the car parts trade. By 2020 remanufacturing made up about 2 percent of all US manufacturing and 1.9 percent in the European Union. ABB says that over the 25 years up to 2020, its remanufactured robot teams refurbished and upgraded thousands of robots.

ASEA's first robot, the IRB 6, beside later IRB 2000 and IRB 3000 models in the ASEA Historical Collections in Västerås. Photo: Dependability / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Second-hand robots also found buyers far from car plants. RM Group, based in Newtown, refurbished ABB IRB 6400 robots, a model often used in car manufacturing, as end-of-line egg palletizers. In 2018 Poultry News reported that 40 had been installed in UK egg packing plants, that a reconditioned system cost around £45,000 and that the payback period would be around three flocks. RM Group's sales director said a shed needed at least 32,000 birds for the robot to pay its way, and that below that manual palletising was more cost effective.

One of two ABB IRB 6400 FoundryPlus robots that spray identification codes on hot beams at the Teesside Beam Mill. Photo: ABB

How ABB and car makers give robots a second life today

ABB runs Global Remanufacture & Workshop Repair Centers in Ostrava in the Czech Republic, Auburn Hills in Michigan and Shanghai, plus local remanufacturing service centers in Brazil, Mexico, Germany and Vietnam. It rebuilds robots from the original design plans, specifications and dimensional data. Its published process starts with traceability checks, then disassembly and a 152-point inspection of robot and controller, and every assembled robot runs at least 16 hours of testing under nominal load before it is labelled ABB-certified. Each remanufactured robot carries a two-year warranty. In 2020 ABB had 400 robots in stock for sale, and more than one left Ostrava every working day.

Refurbished white ABB robots and an older orange unit on pallets in an ABB remanufacturing hall. Photo: ABB

Renault shows how far retrofitting can go in a car plant. The company reports that its Flins site retrofitted more than 150 production robots in 2025, while its THE REMAKERS business gave 350,000 parts from 11,000 references a further life, figures cited in an Innovation News Network analysis on 19 October 2026. The same piece warns that a robot moved to a new task still needs its payload, reach, controls and whole cell checked. ABB's modernization pages describe similar jobs, such as a bottling line upgraded after more than 25 years of double-shift work, and a German motorcycle maker that replaced robots after more than eight years of continuous operation with reconditioned ones.

Aerial view of Renault's Flins factory, May 2018. Photo: Pymouss / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB lists six services for a circular robot life: built to last, extended lifetime, repairing and fixing, upgrade and retrofit, buy back, and remanufacture and refurbish. A remanufactured robot can take ABB's latest controller, which brings ABB Ability Connected services, the current version of RobotStudio and SafeMove, the safety software that lets robots work alongside operators without extensive guarding. Our post on predictive maintenance explains what those connected services monitor. Robots a customer no longer needs can be sold back to ABB for refurbishment, resale or recycling, and ABB says up to 96 percent is responsibly recycled.

Engineers with an ABB OmniCore controller and robot cell. Photo: ABB

Second-life robots and what a circular factory still needs

The wider ABB group is pushing the same idea beyond robots. On 7 September 2026 THE ELEC reported that ABB's Energy Industries service parts circularity program cut electronic waste sent to landfill by 93 percent, from 214.5 kg in 2020 to 14.2 kg in 2023, and recycled 86.5 percent of the materials from parts it could not reuse. ABB also takes back motors and drives at the end of their service life and gives customers credits toward new equipment. Plenty of robot hardware will reach the same point: China alone had an operational stock of 649,447 industrial robots at the end of 2018.

Circuit boards inside an old Unimation robot controller, including a DEC LSI-11/73 processor board. Photo: Autopilot / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB says buyers of its remanufactured robots get the same local support, installation and training as with a new robot. A Polish customer, Vitkovice Milmet, said its remanufactured unit arrived within a week and could not be told apart from a factory-new one at first glance. ABB has also sourced remanufactured robots for customers who wanted to add machines to an existing line after their model was discontinued, so they could keep the same spare parts and training. Upgrading to SafeMove can cut guarding and floor space, which ABB suggests where space is at a premium.

ABB robots working on car bodies in a body shop. Photo: ABB

The open problems are practical. Writing about remanufacturing in general, Innovation News Network notes that returned units vary in quality and type, so a factory can receive enough by weight and still lack the assemblies it needs, and someone must finance exchange stock and carry the risk of obsolete variants. Skills matter too, because every unit has to be taken apart, inspected, restored and tested against a defined specification. Buyers need the paperwork as well. A used robot is a documented capability, and its inspection records and acceptance tests should travel with it.

Robots on a car body line at Ford's plant in Cologne, Germany. Photo: GillyBerlin / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

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