Robotic Wardrobe: ABB Robots and the Smart Closet

A robotic wardrobe sounds like a movie prop, and it began as one. This post follows the closet from carved wooden cupboards to powered hanging rails, then to the startups that tried to fit a robot arm inside a cabinet. It also looks at where robots handle clothes at scale today, in returns warehouses, and at what a home wardrobe would ask of an arm like ABB's GoFa or YuMi. Washing and folding have their own story in our laundry post. This one covers the storage that comes after the wash.

A custom walk-in closet with hanging rails and shelves. Photo: Amy Carroll, Anne Sage and California Closets / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

From carved armoires to the hanging rail

The word wardrobe comes from Old French garderobe, built from "to guard" and "robe", and it first meant a room for keeping garments, not a piece of furniture. English had it by the early 14th century. Early storage was mostly chests. By the late 1500s makers were carving tall armoires, like the one now in the Louvre, dated to about 1580. Clothes lay folded on shelves or hung from pegs inside. The cupboard kept moths and thieves away and did nothing else, and every owner knew exactly where each coat was.

A carved armoire dated to about 1580, now in the Louvre. Photo: Louvre via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The modern wardrobe took shape in the 19th century, with separate sections for hanging rods, shelves and drawers. The Herter Brothers wardrobe at the Metropolitan Museum, made around 1880 to 1885, shows the type at its most decorative, a black cabinet with gilded patterns. It is still passive storage. The owner does every step: find the garment, lift it out, hang it back. Nothing in the furniture sorted, chose or fetched anything until somebody put a motor in it, and for a long time nobody did.

A Herter Brothers wardrobe made around 1880 to 1885. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Dry cleaners got there first. They hang hundreds of tagged, bagged garments from overhead rails and move them along a track to the counter, so the person stands still and the clothes travel. Motorized carousels later brought the same idea into large home closets, where a button turns the rack past you. These systems move clothes but do not pick, sort or put them away. The 1995 film Clueless showed a computer that picked outfits from a closet on a screen, and many people still picture that when they hear "smart wardrobe".

Bagged garments hanging from overhead rails at a dry cleaner. Photo: Simon Law / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Startups, returns warehouses and the arm in the cabinet

In March 2017 Reviewed reported on Threadrobe, a Washington D.C. startup run by Matt Powell. Users dropped clean clothes into a drawer at the bottom, and a robotic arm hung them inside. On request the arm passed a complete outfit through a steamer at the base. Powell called it automated furniture, a hybrid of furniture, appliances, simple robotics and software. RFID Journal described it as using passive UHF RFID tags to identify each item. Both articles say it was sold to consumers. I found no sign that it became a mass product.

ABB's Robotic Fashion Inductor places bagged clothes onto a sorter. Photo: ABB

Compact robotic furniture has kept the idea alive. Ori grew out of MIT's CityHome research and builds storage walls that slide on tracks, and our robotic furniture post covers how that works. The pressure for better closets shows up in plain mechanics too. On 13 September 2026 Hackaday described a coat closet whose hangers pivot like book pages. It holds 24 coats one-handed and more than 30 with two hands, and it has a garage for a robot vacuum. It contains no robot arm, which says a lot about how much people want the space.

Clothes hanging in a home closet, the storage that robotic wardrobes try to automate. Photo: Joeltorresmejia78 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Where clothes meet robots at scale is the returns warehouse. On 7 October 2026 CEVA Logistics began using Sereact's AI dual-arm robots to process Zalando returns at Greven in Germany and Swiebodzin in Poland, on a robotics-as-a-service basis. Sereact's software lets the robots handle items they have not seen before. Public coverage gives no picks per hour, so the results are unknown. Sereact is not an ABB product. ABB's own Robotic Fashion Inductor does a related job in the same kind of building, placing bagged clothes onto a sorter.

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

A wardrobe robot would need soft-goods handling, and that is where today's ABB arms have the least direct history. The GoFa CRB 15000 is a cobot you can guide by hand, and it stops when it senses contact, which suits a machine inside a family home. The YuMi has two arms built for small, fine work. ABB has not announced a wardrobe product, so anything here is a possibility. A cell like that would first be built and tested in RobotStudio, well before anyone buys hardware.

KIT's ARMAR humanoid in a lab, a research platform for household tasks. Photo: NatiSythen / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

What a closet robot still has to solve

Research humanoids such as KIT's ARMAR have worked on household tasks in lab kitchens for years, but a wardrobe does not need one. A fixed arm inside a cabinet moves a short distance along a known path, which is cheaper and safer than a walking robot. The open problems are cloth, which bends and slumps and slips off grippers, the tagging of every garment, hangers that differ in shape, and pinch points near children. Power use and price matter too, since a closet must earn its floor space every day.

The new generation ABB IRB 1200, a compact six axis arm. Photo: ABB

Factories will push the technology first. On 13 October 2026 ABB launched the IRB 1700 and IRB 1700ID at the China International Industry Fair in Shanghai. ABB claims cycle times up to 20 percent shorter than comparable robots and a footprint 50 percent smaller than the earlier model, and the ID version routes cables inside the arm. The listed uses are material handling, welding, sanding and machine tending, not garments. A small, fast, tidy arm is the shape a closet robot would take, and cloth handling is the skill it still has to learn.

An ABB YuMi assembling small parts beside a lab worker. Photo: ABB

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