Stair Climbing Robot: Hand Trucks, Legs and ABB

A stair climbing robot story: porters, stairlifts and the iBOT, Evri's legged courier and Roborock's Rover in 2026, and where ABB robots fit in making them.

INDUSTRIAL ROBOTICS

Chat With Robot

10/6/20265 min read

Stairs are where most home robots stop. A robot vacuum cleans one floor, a delivery robot waits at the kerb, and a person still carries the shopping, the laundry basket or the new washing machine up to the next landing. A stair climbing robot is meant to take over that last part. This post starts with how people moved loads, and themselves, up stairs before robots, then covers the stairlifts, hand trucks and wheelchairs that came first, the legged and wheeled machines on trial this autumn, and where ABB robots fit, which for now is mostly in the factories that build these products.

A small four wheeled robot partway up a set of plywood test stairs

A small wheeled robot on test stairs at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, 2013. Photo: NIST via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Porters, stairlifts and the first climbing wheels

For most of history, loads went upstairs on someone's back. Coal, furniture, water and pianos were carried by hand, often by two or three people working together, and moving firms still do much of it that way. The work is slow and hard on knees and spines, and narrow, winding stairs in old houses make it worse. People who could not climb stairs themselves had few choices. They were carried, or they moved into a ground floor room and stayed there.

Two men in black T-shirts lifting a wooden upright piano outdoors

Two movers lift an upright piano by hand. Photo: HireAHelper / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

The first machines rode beside the stairs instead of climbing them. In the 1920s C.C. Crispen, a businessman in Pennsylvania, built a chair that ran along a rail so that an ailing friend could get between floors. He called it the Inclin-ator, and the Inclinator Company of America was selling stairlifts in the 1930s. For goods, hand truck makers added clusters of three wheels on each side. As a cluster turns, one wheel always rests on a step, so a person can roll a heavy load up the stairs instead of lifting it.

A man pulling a large white box up stone garden steps on a stair climbing hand truck

Rolling a heavy load up garden steps on a hand truck with three-wheel stair climbing clusters. Photo: Erinhensley3 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The iBOT was the best known early attempt to give a wheelchair a way up the stairs. Development started in 1990 at Dean Kamen's DEKA Research in New Hampshire. Besides driving normally, the chair could balance on two wheels to raise its user to eye level, and its stair mode let a trained user go up and down stairs. The US Food and Drug Administration cleared it in August 2003. Independence Technology built it until 2009, and Mobius Mobility has made a newer version since 2019. Tracked rescue robots were tackling stairs in the same years, on test stairs like the ones NIST built to compare them.

A man on a Segway talking on stage next to a seated man in a black iBOT wheelchair

Dean Kamen on a Segway beside a rider in an iBOT wheelchair, 2002. Photo: redjar / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Legged couriers and stair climbing vacuums in 2026

Legs gave robots a more general way to handle steps. Boston Dynamics' four legged Spot became the company's first commercially available robot in 2019, and inspection robots such as ANYmal now walk up stairs on industrial sites. On 28 September 2026 the parcel firm Evri started a trial in Barnsley, England, of a two legged delivery robot from Japan's Refined Robotics. It has wheels at the ends of its legs, carries parcels of up to 15 kg at up to 6 km/h, and is designed to climb steps and get in and out of delivery vans. It can run on its own or under remote monitoring.

A yellow four legged Spot robot standing on a dirt path among trees

A Boston Dynamics Spot quadruped on a forest path. Photo: Jonte / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Robot vacuums are heading the same way. At IFA in Berlin in early September 2026, Roborock showed the Rover, a vacuum with two retractable legs that end in wheels. A Tom's Guide reviewer watched it climb a flight of stairs, clean them and come back down in about three minutes. Roborock first showed the Rover at CES in January and still gave no release date. The same reviewer had seen Dreame's Cyber X climb stairs at IFA 2025, and a year later it was still not on sale.

A round black and red robot vacuum on a white display stand

A robot vacuum on display at IFA in Berlin. Photo: Matti Blume / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB does not sell a robot that climbs stairs. Its Flexley Mover AMRs, such as the P604, find their way with 3D visual SLAM on flat factory floors, and in multistorey buildings robots like these normally ride a lift. ABB is more likely to show up where stair climbers are made. Hand trucks, stairlift rails and robot frames are welded metal, and ABB arc welding robots or the GoFa Cobot Arc Welding Package could weld them in small batches. That is a possible use, not a project ABB has announced. Programs like these are usually built and tested first in RobotStudio.

A low white ABB autonomous mobile robot on a concrete floor among stacked wooden pallets

ABB's Flexley Mover P604 moves loads around a plant without fixed tracks, on flat floors. Photo: ABB

What stair robots still have to solve

In homes, the next few years will probably bring a mix. Stairlifts and powered stair climbers will stay the safe choice for carrying people, because they are certified and simple. Legged vacuums and couriers are likely to show up first in larger houses and apartment blocks, moving light loads. The harder goal is a robot that brings a full laundry basket or a crate of drinks upstairs and puts it down in the right place, which needs legs and an arm. Our overview of ABB robot use cases shows the kinds of handling tasks today's arms already do in factories.

A worker guides the welding torch on a white ABB GoFa cobot above a steel welding table

ABB's GoFa Cobot Arc Welding Package on a welding table. Photo: ABB

Factories and care homes want mobile robots that reach every floor without waiting for a lift. Legged inspection robots already climb the stairs on plant walkways. A collaborative arm such as ABB's GoFa CRB 15000, which stops when it senses contact, is the kind of arm researchers mount on mobile bases for care tasks, and ABB uses GoFa in its own healthcare research. Putting such an arm on a base that can also climb stairs is still a research problem, and no ABB product does it today.

A white and grey ABB cobot arm working at a lab bench in front of a healthcare research wall

A GoFa cobot at ABB's healthcare research hub. Photo: ABB

Price comes first among the open problems. A legged robot costs many times more than a hand truck, and its batteries have to last a whole route. Safety is harder still: a robot that slips on a stair can fall onto a person, a child or a pet, so it has to check every step and stop safely, above all when it is carrying weight. Owners and carers will also need training to know what these machines can and cannot do, in the same way people learn to use evacuation chairs on stairs today.

A woman guiding an evacuation chair with a seated man down a red staircase

A man is taken down a staircase in an evacuation chair. Photo: Joep Cuijpers / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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