Robotic Refueling: From Pump Attendants to ABB Arms

Robotic refueling has been tried at filling stations for almost thirty years. The job looks simple enough: open a small door, unscrew a cap, push a nozzle in and stop when the tank is full. A robot finds it awkward, because every car model puts its filler somewhere different. This post follows the work from uniformed pump attendants to self-service, through the first robot pumps in California, the Netherlands and Sweden, to the robot bays now running in China, in mines and at sea, and looks at where ABB robots could fit.

A Sinopec filling station in Zhengzhou, 2021. Sinopec has trialled robot fuelling bays at selected Chinese stations. Photo: Windmemories / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From pump attendants to the first robot pumps

For the first half of the twentieth century somebody else filled your car. Attendants in caps pumped the fuel, wiped the windscreen and checked the oil and tyres while the driver stayed in the seat. That changed slowly. The first self-service station in the United States was opened in Los Angeles in 1947 by Frank Urich, and Canada followed in 1949 with a station in Winnipeg run by Henderson Thriftway Petroleum. Even so, full service stayed the normal way to buy fuel in the United States until about 1970. Today few American stations still offer full service.

An attendant fills a car with custom blend gasoline at a Sunoco station near Washington, D.C., in 1958. Photo: Thomas J. O'Halloran, Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Self-service moved the work from a paid attendant to the driver, and inventors soon asked whether a machine could take it over instead. The first patents for automatic fuelling were issued in 1963 to Charles Mays and Lee Darwin. The first serious field test came much later. In April 1997 Shell put its SmartPump, a robotic fuelling system, into a filling station in Sacramento, California. Shell developed it and market tested it at that station, but the SmartPump never turned into a product you could find at ordinary filling stations.

A self-service sign at a Shell station in Porvoo, Finland, in 1970. Photo: Finnish Heritage Agency via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

In Europe the next attempts came from engineering firms. Rotec Engineering in the Netherlands built Tankpitstop, which opened at a Dutch filling station on 4 February 2008, with the robot housed in an enclosure next to an ordinary pump island. In October 2013 the Stockholm company Fuelmatics showed a robot pump made with the Husky Corporation at the NACS Show in Atlanta. A suction cup opened the fuel door and a nozzle went in through a capless insert that drivers fitted in place of the old cap. Fuelmatics said the process took 30 percent less time than pumping by hand.

The fuel filler of a VW Golf. Robot pumps have to find and open doors like this on every model. Photo: Basotxerri / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Where robotic refueling works today

The largest current rollout is in China. Sinopec and CNPC have run robot fuelling bays at selected stations since September 2021, and Gadget Review described the systems again on 24 September 2026. The driver books through an app and parks in the bay. Cameras locate the fuel door, then the arm opens it, fuels the car, removes the nozzle and closes the door. Sinopec's early trial in Nanning took about 180 seconds per car. CNPC's system, built with Kunlun Digital Technology and Hangzhou Helios Innovation, takes about 120 seconds. Both rely on 3D vision and deep learning, because fuel doors differ in position, shape and opening mechanism.

A Sinopec petrol station on Zhanlanlu in Beijing, 2022. Photo: N509FZ / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Away from car forecourts, the strongest case is a vehicle with no driver at all. Scott Automation's Robofuel uses vision to find the tank on a mining truck and couple the nozzle. A Robofuel installation in Western Australia's Pilbara reached site acceptance in late 2019 and works with an autonomous fleet of Komatsu 930E haul trucks. Another firm, Universal Field Robots, has followed with a system called AutoFuel. At sea, the US Navy said in September 2026 that a robotic connector towed behind the USNS Vindicator had refuelled the T38 drone boat off Virginia in about 100 connection cycles.

A Komatsu 930E haul truck, the model that Robofuel refuels in an autonomous fleet in the Pilbara. Photo: Cvmontuy / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

ABB does not appear in any of these refuelling projects, so its role here is a possibility. It already makes something close. The ABB eMine Robot Automated Connection Device is a robot arm with a vision system that plugs a charging connector into an electric mining truck, which we covered in our post on EV charging robots. For liquid fuel, a mid-size arm such as the IRB 1300 in its Foundry Plus 2 version, sealed against water and dust, or a larger IRB 6700 for heavy truck nozzles, could take the same role, with SafeMove keeping it slow or stopped when a person walks into the bay.

ABB's eMine Robot Automated Connection Device, a robot arm that plugs in electric mining trucks, at MINExpo 2024. Photo: ABB

Robot fuel bays in the years ahead

For private cars the future of the robot pump is uncertain. Electric cars keep gaining ground, and a station operator who adds a robot bay for petrol has to ask how many years of petrol sales are left to pay for it. Robot fuelling is most useful for drivers who cannot easily get out of the car, in cold or wet weather, and at stations that already run unstaffed at night. Gases that are unpleasant or risky to handle by hand, such as liquefied natural gas for trucks, are another case. Rotec already lists an automated LNG fuelling system.

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

In mines and military logistics the payback is easier to measure. An autonomous haul truck that still has to wait for a person with a hose is only partly autonomous. A robot that refuels it on the haul road keeps the truck working and keeps people away from heavy machines. ABB has used the same argument for its explosive charging robot, described in our post on robotic blast hole charging. Navy planners want the same thing for drone boats so that they need fewer trips back to port.

A US Navy unmanned surface vessel during a survey in 2025. The Navy now refuels drone boats like this with a robotic connector at sea. Photo: U.S. Navy via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Robotic refueling still has hard problems. A robot bay costs far more than a pump and needs enough cars per day to pay off. Fuel doors are not standardised, so vision systems must cope with hundreds of models, or drivers must fit inserts as Fuelmatics asked. Fuel vapour means the equipment has to meet strict rules for explosive atmospheres. Station and mine staff also need the skills to maintain the cell. Engineers usually build and test cells like this first in RobotStudio before any arm meets a real fuel tank.

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

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