Instrument Sterilization Robot: Trays, Steam and ABB

Every operation ends with a pile of used clamps, scissors and retractors that must be cleaned, checked, counted, packed into the right tray and sterilised before the next patient. A hospital's sterile processing department does this by hand, thousands of times a day, and a missing or dirty instrument can stop a surgery. For that reason hospitals have started to test the instrument sterilization robot. This post looks at how the job grew from carbolic acid and steam boxes, which robots now sort and pack surgical trays, and how ABB arms such as YuMi and GoFa could fit.

An open steriliser loaded with racks of instrument containers. Photo: KOchstudiO / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

From carbolic spray to the central sterile department

Before the 1860s surgeons often went from one patient to the next with instruments that had only been wiped, and wound infection killed many patients who survived the operation itself. In Glasgow, Joseph Lister began treating wounds and instruments with carbolic acid, and in 1867 he published his antiseptic method. His team also sprayed a mist of carbolic acid over the operating field with a steam spray like the one now kept in Glasgow's Hunterian Museum. It was hard on surgeons' skin and lungs, and the spray was later dropped, but the idea that every instrument must be treated before it touches a patient stayed.

Lister's carbolic steam spray apparatus, kept at the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow. Photo: Stephencdickson / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Heat replaced chemicals. Charles Chamberland, who worked with Louis Pasteur, invented the autoclave in 1879, a pressure vessel that kills microbes with saturated steam. The German surgeon Ernst von Bergmann was the first physician to introduce heat sterilisation of surgical instruments, and he showed that steam sterilised dressings worked better than chemical antisepsis. Hospitals gradually moved the work out of the operating theatre into central departments. There staff took instruments apart, scrubbed them, inspected them, wrapped them in sets and ran them through the steriliser.

A medical autoclave of the type invented by Charles Chamberland, at a museum of medical history in Hautefort, France. Photo: Bachelot Pierre J-P / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Automation came first to the washing step. Automatic washer disinfectors and ultrasonic cleaners took over much of the scrubbing, and labels with barcodes now record what is in each set, when it was sterilised and when it expires. The packing stayed manual. A technician still has to recognise dozens of similar looking clamps and put each one in its place. An early attempt to give that job to a robot is a patent filed in December 2007 by Michael Treat and colleagues. It describes a robot that unloads instruments, identifies them with machine vision, inspects them and repacks them into trays for sterilisation.

The sterilizing room of the base hospital at Camp Meade, Maryland, around 1917 to 1918. Photo: W.L. Mann, U.S. National Archives via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Robots meet the sterile processing department

In September 2026 Infection Control Today reported on a talk by Randalyn Harreld of Steelco Belimed about burnout and cognitive overload among sterile processing staff. Technicians are interrupted constantly while following manufacturer instructions for use, some of which have more than 100 steps. Two days later the consultancy Surgical Directions launched a diagnostic service aimed at what it called growing sterile processing risks. Tray assembly is the step where an interruption most easily leads to a missing or misplaced instrument.

A sterile set from a hospital's central supply department, with a barcode label giving contents, sterilisation date and expiry date. Photo: Ptrump16 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

A few robots already do that step. At Wellstar Windy Hill Hospital in Georgia, a robotic arm from RIF Robotics assembled part of a minor surgical tray in December 2023. In that system a technician loads looped instruments such as forceps onto a conveyor, and the robot scans, identifies, counts and sorts them so trays can be packed faster. A research paper presented at the 2026 International Symposium on Medical Robotics went further. It used a Stäubli TX2-60L arm with a magnetic gripper, a camera trained on 31 instrument types, and 3D printed holders, and its trays had fewer tool to tool collisions than trays packed by people.

Surgical instruments laid out for an operation, the sets that sterile processing staff must count and pack. Photo: Ibrahim Achiri / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB has not announced a sterile processing robot, so its part here is a possibility. Several of its existing robots suit the work. The dual arm YuMi IRB 14000 was designed to handle small parts beside people, and the single arm YuMi IRB 14050 suits a compact sorting station. A GoFa CRB 15000 cobot, with a 5 kg payload and 950 mm reach, could lift full trays from a conveyor into a wrapping area. ABB has already shown a mobile YuMi concept for hospital labs, described in our post on hospital lab automation, so hospitals have seen its arms working near staff.

ABB's mobile YuMi concept, a dual arm robot on a wheeled base, in a hospital lab corridor. Photo: ABB

What the next sterile processing robots need

The first robots in sterile processing will most likely share the bench with technicians. A person checks for remaining soil and tests that hinges and ratchets work, while the robot counts, sorts and places instruments. Smaller hospitals and outpatient surgery centres, where one technician may cover the whole department on a night shift, could use a compact cobot cell. Larger central departments that serve several hospitals are the more likely buyers of full robot lines that also load washers and sterilisers.

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

The technical problems are still large. Surgical instruments are shiny and look alike, which confuses cameras, and many hospitals use thousands of different instrument types, far more than the 31 in the research paper. Every part that touches instruments must itself survive cleaning, heat and chemicals. A hygienic arm such as the IRB 1200 Hygienic, built for washdown in food plants, shows the kind of design that would be needed. Hospitals will also want every robot action recorded so that each tray has a full history.

An ABB IRB 1200 Hygienic robot picking bananas, a food handling demo of its washdown design. Photo: ABB

Cost and skills will set the pace. A robot cell has to fit into a crowded department and pay for itself in fewer delayed operations and fewer errors. Technicians need training to run and correct the robot, and colleges are already adding sterile processing programmes. Programs for sorting cells like this are usually built and tested first in RobotStudio, and simpler tasks can be taught with ABB's Wizard easy programming, as explained in our guide to controlling robots with no code.

Programming a single arm YuMi with Wizard on the FlexPendant. Photo: ABB

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