Shoe Shine Robot: From Bootblacks to ABB Cobots

A good shine takes a brush, a rag, wax and ten minutes of patient rubbing, which is the kind of small, skilled hand job robots find hard. A shoe shine robot has to follow the curve of a toe cap, press just hard enough and stop before it scuffs the leather. This post goes from the bootblacks on city street corners to the coin operated polishers in station halls, then to the research cobots that now polish luxury shoes in Italian factories. Along the way it asks where ABB robots could fit and how far we are from a robot that shines shoes at home.

A shoeshine stand outside Grand Central Terminal in New York, 2015. Photo: Giorgio Galeotti / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Bootblacks, brushes and coin machines

For more than a century, shining shoes was street work, often done by children. Bootblacks set up a box and a footrest on a corner or in a station and worked for coins. Horatio Alger made one the hero of his 1868 novel Ragged Dick, and around 1910 the photographer Lewis Hine documented young bootblacks in New York for the National Child Labor Committee. Shoeshine stands with tall chairs for adult customers later became fixtures in barbershops, hotels, train stations and airports, and some still run today.

A young bootblack at work in Union Square, New York, around 1910. Photo: Lewis Hine, National Child Labor Committee, Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Inventors tried to replace the bootblack with a machine early on. In 1894 John Friedlander of St. Louis, Missouri, patented a machine for polishing shoes: pressing the foot rest set brushes sweeping around the shoe along cam tracks shaped like its outline, while each brush spun fast on its own axis. In 1932 Jacob T. Uden patented a coin operated shoe shining machine. A coin closed the switch for an electric motor that drove an endless belt of bristles, a blower drew the dust away, and the customer moved a foot around on a board while the belt ran.

An old coin operated shoe shine machine, still working in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, in 2008. Photo: daryl_mitchell / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

That basic design survived. The shoe polishers found in hotel corridors, office lobbies and station concourses still use rotating brushes, sometimes with a polish dispenser, and the user still does the steering by moving the shoe around. They are cheap and fast. What they cannot do is what a skilled shiner does: work polish into creases, build up a mirror shine on the toe with thin layers of wax and water, or treat suede differently from calf. Robot arms with force control are meant to close that gap.

An automatic shoe shine machine at Tokyo Station's Yaesu underground mall, 2007. Photo: Kohei Uesaka / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Cobots that polish luxury leather

The most serious robot shoe shining today happens in factories rather than shops. At the Università Politecnica delle Marche in Ancona, in the Marche, one of Italy's main shoemaking regions, researchers have spent several years on cobot polishing of luxury leather shoes. A paper at the RAAD 2023 robotics conference in Bled, Slovenia, described a UR5e cobot polishing the toe of a shoe while controlling the contact force of its tool. A 2024 follow up described a force controlled cell tested on various shoe models and put to work on an industrial production line, with people still designing the process and doing the final finishing.

A 1930s tin of Kiwi boot polish made in England. Photo: R. Henrik Nilsson / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

General home robots are getting closer to small chores of this kind. On 1 October 2026, ABC News showed Taku, a wheeled semi humanoid from Dyna Robotics with two seven axis arms. In the company's demonstration it worked through an hour of laundry on its own, loading washers and dryers, folding towels and shelving them, and picking up towels it dropped. We could not find a home robot on sale that shines shoes. The skills Taku shows, recognising objects, handling them gently and switching between tasks, are the ones a shoe care robot would need.

A Unitree G1 humanoid, one of the general purpose robots aimed at everyday tasks. Photo: Sayanesy / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

ABB robots are already in shoe factories. DESMA uses them in its direct soling systems, which we covered in our post on robots in shoe manufacturing. For polishing, ABB offers Force Control for its industrial arms, so a robot can keep a set pressure on a surface while it follows the shape. A GoFa CRB 15000 cobot, which senses contact and can work next to a person, could hold a brush or cloth on a shoe the way the Italian UR5e does. ABB has not announced a shoe polishing cell, so this is a possibility built from existing products.

ABB robots in a DESMA direct soling system at Strauss's shoe factory. Photo: ABB

Will a robot shine your shoes at home?

In factories, the next step is closing the loop. A camera or gloss sensor would check the shine and send the robot back over dull patches. Leather varies from hide to hide, so a fixed path will never be enough; the robot has to adjust its force and the number of passes. Programs for curved parts like a shoe last are easier to build in RobotStudio, where an engineer can generate the path from a 3D model and check reach before the cell exists.

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

At home, a shoe care station is easier to imagine than a robot that does everything. A small enclosed box could clean, condition and buff shoes with fixed brushes and a camera, the way a dishwasher handles plates without a robot arm. A general purpose home robot like Taku could do the same job with ordinary brushes, but it would have to learn it from demonstrations, and polish and wax are messy to handle. A two armed home robot also costs far more than anyone would pay to save ten minutes a week.

Lead through teaching: moving an ABB GoFa arm by hand. Photo: ABB

A shoe is less fragile than a person, but a robot can still mark the leather in a moment by pressing too hard or catching a lace, and each kind of leather needs its own settings. For now, cost keeps robot polishing on expensive shoes in factories. What the force sensing research is trying to copy is the shoeshiner's judgement: reading the leather and knowing when to stop. Until robots manage that, the shoeshine stand at the airport will keep its customers.

An empty shoeshine stand at Chicago's O'Hare airport. Photo: Piotrus / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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