ABB Robots in Robotics Education and Training

In 1942, learning to work with machines meant standing next to one. Youth training programs in the US put young people at lathes and welding benches, with an instructor watching every cut. Factories hired on those skills for decades. Robots barely appeared in schools until the 1980s, and then mostly at universities.

Trainees learning machine shop practice in a National Youth Administration program, 1942. Photo: Fritz Henle / Library of Congress (public domain)

That changed as robots got cheaper and safer. Kids now meet robotics early through classroom kits and competitions like FIRST, where teams build and program a machine in a few weeks. The gap is the step after that: few students ever touch the kind of industrial arm they would program at work.

Schoolchildren programming a small robot in Tallinn, Estonia. Photo: EU2017EE Estonian Presidency / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

ABB's education package is aimed at that gap. It puts a GoFa cobot on a tabletop cell with 56 hours of lessons, lab exercises in RobotStudio and a recognized STEM certification. Students as young as 15 can use it, because they can move the arm by hand and program it with ABB's Wizard block-based tool.

Students trying the ABB Robotics Education Package with a GoFa cobot. Photo: ABB

WorldSkills Shanghai 2026 runs this week, from September 22 to 27, with about 1,400 competitors from 73 countries and regions. In the Robot Systems Integration contest, 20 teams have to complete an industry-style robot cell task set by FANUC.

A student robotics competition in progress. Photo: Gracielaaleon / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

For schools that want a full industrial robot, ABB launched the IRB 1090, a six-axis arm designed for classrooms and powered by the OmniCore controller. Each one comes with 100 free RobotStudio premium licenses, so a class can simulate programs on laptops before running them on the real robot.

Students working with the ABB IRB 1090 education robot. Photo: ABB

Next, I expect more robot time per student, and more of it at home. RobotStudio already lets anyone build and test a virtual cell on a PC, and home robots will make programming one feel like an ordinary skill. For many future technicians, the first robot program will probably be a simulation written at a kitchen table.

The ABB GoFa education cell with its teach pendant and screen. Photo: ABB

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