Robotic Furniture: Murphy Beds to ABB Safety Lessons

A small flat has to be a bedroom at night and a living room by day, and for well over a century people have handled that with beds that fold away. Robotic furniture adds motors, sensors and an app, so a bed slides out of a wall unit or drops from the ceiling when you press a button. This post follows the idea from folding cabinet beds and the Murphy bed to MIT's CityHome project, Ori's motorised wall systems and the ceiling storage of Bumblebee Spaces. It also asks what ABB has learned about robots that move near people, from the GoFa cobot to SafeMove, and how that applies to furniture that moves.

A woman folding a Murphy bed up into its wall frame. Photo: David Boyle / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

How cabinet beds and Murphy beds freed up floor space

Furniture that hides a bed is older than the electric motor. In the eighteenth century folding beds were sold as the bureau bedstead, which closed up to look like a chest of drawers. In 1885 Sarah E. Goode, who ran a furniture store on State Street in Chicago with her husband, received a US patent for a cabinet bed that folded into a desk. Railways did the same thing at a larger scale. In Pullman sleeping cars the upper berths folded up against the ceiling during the day and came down at night, so one car could work as a day coach and as a dormitory.

A Pullman passenger car at the Saskatchewan Railway Museum, with its upper berth folded against the ceiling. Photo: SriMesh / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The name most people know is Murphy. William Lawrence Murphy, who lived in San Francisco, received a patent for a "Disappearing Bed" on 18 June 1912 and another for a bed design in 1916. Both used pivots and counterweights so a full size bed could swing up into a closet. The story goes that he wanted his one room flat to double as a parlour where he could receive guests. In 1989 a US federal appeals court ruled that "Murphy bed" had become such a common term that it could no longer be protected as a trademark. The counterweight still does most of the work: a well balanced wall bed takes very little force to lift.

Workmen installing a wall bed cabinet in a Florida home, 2021. Photo: Whoisjohngalt / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Compact living kept pushing designers toward furniture that changes shape. In Tokyo, Kisho Kurokawa's Nakagin Capsule Tower, completed in 1972, gave each resident a prefabricated capsule with the bed, desk, storage and bathroom built into the walls. The building was demolished in 2022. In 2011 the Changing Places group at the MIT Media Lab started CityHome, a research project on what the team called architectural robotics. They prototyped a moveable wall and built a mock 200 square foot studio on the lab's fifth floor, where furniture on motorised tracks could turn one room into a bedroom, a living room or an office.

Inside a capsule of Kisho Kurokawa's Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo, with the bed and appliances built in, 2004. Photo: Chris 73 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Ori, Bumblebee Spaces and the motorised flat

CityHome turned into a company. Hasier Larrea and three co-founders from the Media Lab started Ori in 2015, worked with designer Yves Béhar on the look, and launched the Ori Studio Suite in April 2018 at about $10,000. Ori describes its system as a muscle of tracks and low power motors, a skeleton of frame and wheels, and a small computer that runs the safety features. Today Ori sells to apartment developers rather than to individual buyers. It says it has installed more than 2,000 systems in over 1,750 apartments in 64 US cities, each with safety stop and anti lift protection, and that the systems are listed to UL 962 for household furnishings.

The MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, home of the CityHome project, 2008. Photo: Madcoverboy / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Bumblebee Spaces, a San Francisco startup co-founded by Sankarshan Murthy, went up instead of sideways. Its modules keep a bed, a wardrobe or boxes in the ceiling and lower them on a voice command or a button press, and the system pauses if someone walks underneath. IKEA worked with Ori on ROGNAN, a robotic storage unit built on IKEA's PLATSA frames, announced in June 2019 for launch in Hong Kong and Japan in 2020. The plain version is in fashion again too: in September 2026 House Beautiful ran a piece saying designers now treat Murphy beds as stylish rather than tacky. More homes with heavy moving furniture means more people standing next to it.

A building of small apodment units in Seattle, the kind of compact rental flat robotic furniture is sold for. Photo: Joe Mabel / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

We found no ABB robotic furniture product, and none of these companies say they use ABB parts. ABB's work on robots that share space with people still applies. The GoFa CRB 15000 cobot has torque sensors in each of its six joints, so it feels an unexpected push and stops. SafeMove, ABB's safety software for the robot controller, limits speed, watches defined zones and checks that the robot stays still when it should. A motorised wall or a ceiling bed has to answer the same design questions about how fast it may move, where it must not go and what it does when a person or a pet is in the way.

ABB's GoFa cobot is guided by hand and stops when it senses contact. Photo: ABB

Where moving walls and ceiling beds go next

Robotic furniture will probably spread first in new rental buildings, where developers can install it before tenants move in and service it centrally. After that, expect heavier and more varied motion: beds that lower from the ceiling over a sofa, wardrobes that bring clothes down to you, kitchen units that rise and fall. Factories have run arms from overhead rails for years, as our post on ceiling-mounted robot arms at home explains. ABB's IRB 6620LX, for example, runs along a gantry above machine tools, and the safety thinking from those cells applies to anything heavy that moves above people.

ABB IRB 6620LX robots on an overhead rail tending CNC machines at DAU Componentes, Spain. Photo: ABB

Cost, safety and servicing are the open problems. At around $10,000 for a suite, robotic furniture is priced for developers who can spread the cost over rent, not for most home buyers. Furniture is covered by lighter safety rules than industrial robots, so makers set their own limits for force, speed and pinch points. Motors, belts and sensors wear out, and a bed stuck halfway down is a bigger problem than a stuck drawer. Robot programs are usually built and tested first in RobotStudio, and furniture makers could likewise simulate every move before a resident ever touches the product.

Engineers with an ABB OmniCore controller and robot cell, where safety functions like SafeMove run. Photo: ABB

At home, the simplest answer will often stay mechanical. A balanced Murphy bed or a folding camp bed needs no power and no software, and many people will choose that. Robotic furniture makes most sense where floor space is very expensive, where residents cannot lift heavy panels, or where one room changes role several times a day. Robot arms have also been taught to put furniture together, which our post on flat-pack furniture assembly covers. Whether the safety ideas behind cobots like GoFa end up inside the furniture itself is still an open question.

A folding wooden camp stretcher used by a New Zealand officer in Burma in the Second World War. Photo: Auckland War Memorial Museum via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

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