Sheep Shearing Robot: From Blade Shears to ABB Arms

Shearing is one of the hardest jobs on a sheep farm. A shearer bends over each animal and takes the fleece off in one piece, sheep after sheep, through a long day in a hot shed. Australia spent almost twenty years trying to build a sheep shearing robot to do the work instead. This post goes from blade shears and the first powered handpieces to the University of Western Australia robots of the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s. It then looks at the shearer shortage in the news this autumn, at where ABB robots could help along the wool chain, and at why robot shearing never left the lab.

A pet sheep shorn with blades on a front verandah in Runanga, New Zealand, in the 1980s. Photo: Harikuri2019 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How blade shears and shearing sheds gave way to research robots

Before machines, sheep were shorn with blade shears, two blades joined at the end farthest from the points and squeezed with one hand. Blades leave a little wool on the sheep, so they are still used where the weather is cold. In the Canterbury high country of New Zealand around half a million sheep are still shorn with blades each year. Good blade shearers were very fast. In 1892 Jackie Howe shore 321 sheep with blades in 7 hours and 40 minutes at Alice Downs station in Queensland. That is a sheep about every minute and a half, all day, by hand.

A pair of Sheffield made hand held sheep shears in the Auckland Museum collection. Photo: Auckland Museum / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Powered shearing came from an Australian sheepgrower, Frederick York Wolseley. Machines built in Birmingham by his Wolseley Sheep Shearing Machine Company came into use after 1888, cutting shearing time and the number of second cuts. In a machine shed each shearer holds a handpiece, in which a toothed cutter is driven back and forth over a comb, powered from a central engine through overhead gear. Wolseley also sold the stationary engines that drove those sheds. The machine did the cutting faster, yet a person still caught every sheep, held it in position and steered every stroke of the handpiece across its body.

A Wolseley sheep shearing engine from about 1918 at the Faraday Museum of Technology in Napier, New Zealand. Photo: Daderot / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Robots came into the picture in the 1970s. James Trevelyan at the University of Western Australia led the development of the first sheep shearing robot between 1975 and 1993, with money from the Australian Wool Corporation. A film of the first robot shearing a sheep was shown at the International Symposium on Industrial Robots in Paris in 1982. Trevelyan's 1992 book, Robots for Shearing Sheep: Shear Magic, describes robots that could take the whole fleece off a Merino in one piece, including the robot called ORACLE. In 1993 he received the Engelberger Science and Technology Award for this work.

Shearers at work along the board of the shed at Yandilla Station, Queensland, around 1894. Photo: State Library of Queensland via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The robots were slow. In 1991 Roger Thiessen of the Australian Wool Corporation told the Christian Science Monitor that the UWA system, backed with A$7 million, took 16 minutes to shear a sheep and was still at the research stage. Merino Wool Harvesting in Adelaide tried another method, passing a small electric current through the sheep so that the shearing head was repelled and stayed just above the skin. Its machine sheared a sheep in 90 seconds, but the company said its funding had run out in 1990 and it was looking for more to start field tests. The UWA project ended in 1993.

Sheep penned for shearing at Eglinton's, Whangapoua, on Great Barrier Island, New Zealand, in 1902. Photo: Henry Winkelmann via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The shearer shortage and where robots fit today

Shearing labour is back in the news. On 22 October 2026 FarmingUK reported that sheep shearers had been left off a UK visa list, as fears grow about labour for 2027. Since 2011 a concession had let up to 75 shearers from Australia and New Zealand work in the UK each season, helping to shear between 1.5 million and 2 million sheep at peak time. The Home Office closed it after June 2026 and told the sector to rely on domestic workers. The government says more than 4,000 people have been trained as shearers since 2021, and only 16 overseas shearers used the concession in its final year.

Reg Humphrey with a sheep at shearing time behind Peckover House in Wisbech, England, in 1956. Photo: Richard Humphrey / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Nobody is offering a robot to fill that gap. The UWA machines showed that a robot could shear a sheep, but a shearer travels from farm to farm with a handpiece and a bag of gear, while a robot needs power, a cradle that holds the animal still and somebody to look after it. Every sheep is a different shape, wrinkled Merino skin is hard to follow, and a slip cuts a live animal. The National Sheep Association's Michael Priestley told FarmingUK that becoming a professional shearer takes years of technical refinement and physical conditioning, which is the skill a robot would have to copy.

A portable shearing machine in use on a reservation in the United States, from the National Archives. Photo: National Archives via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

ABB does not make a shearing robot, and we found no ABB shearing project. Its robots could fit around the fleece once it is off the sheep. Wool is pressed into heavy bales, and lifting and stacking heavy bags and bales is the daily job of ABB's IRB 460 and IRB 660 palletizers in other industries; the IRB 660 handles loads of up to 250 kg. Keeping a tool pressed evenly on a curved surface, the core skill in shearing, is close to what ABB arms such as the IRB 6700 do in grinding and polishing cells. Our post on dairy milking automation shows how robots already work with livestock.

An ABB IRB 660 palletizer stacking boxed goods at the end of a line. Photo: ABB

What comes next for wool automation

Robots that touch animals already exist on farms, mostly milking robots that let cows decide when to be milked. Sheep are harder to justify. Many flocks are shorn once a year, so a shearing machine would stand idle for most of the year, often on farms far from a service engineer. Help is more likely to come first in handling, moving sheep to the shearing board and catching them, than in the cutting itself. For small hobby flocks the cost question is even sharper, and a visiting shearer will stay the answer for a long time.

An ABB IRB 6700 grinding a steel part in Teqram's EasyGrinder cell at Ancofer. Photo: ABB

Further along the chain, wool passes through brokers' stores, testing labs and scouring plants, where bales are weighed, sampled and moved, and that is where robots are the easiest to imagine. A collaborative arm like the GoFa CRB 15000 can work next to staff, and ABB's Flexley Mover AMRs can move loads between stations. Training matters at both ends. The sector trains hundreds of new shearers a year, while robot cells need technicians who can program paths that follow a surface, something students can practise in RobotStudio long before they touch real wool.

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

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