Theme Park Robot Arm Rides and Where ABB Fits In

A theme park robot arm ride puts people where a car body or a stack of boxes would normally sit: in the grip of a six-axis industrial robot that swings them through the air. The idea is younger than most rides, but it grew out of two older machines, the fairground carousel and the flight trainer. This post follows that line from steam roundabouts and the Link Trainer to the KUKA Robocoaster and Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey. It then looks at the Disney ride now being built in California and asks where ABB's large robots and software could fit into a field ABB has so far left to others.

Visitors ride a KUKA Robocoaster arm at the Farnborough Air Show, 2008. Photo: Andrew Skudder / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

How carousels and flight trainers set up the robot ride

Fairground rides were mechanised long before robots. In the 1860s and 1870s Frederick Savage, an engineer in King's Lynn, England, built carousels driven by a horizontal steam engine at the centre. He added gears and offset cranks to the platform so the wooden horses rose and fell as they went round, the "galloping horse" that carousel makers still copy. He also built a roundabout called Sea-on-Land, whose boats pitched and rolled on cranks. The gearing fixed every motion on these rides. A rider got exactly the same movement on every turn, and changing it meant rebuilding the machine.

Children on a small merry-go-round at the Minnesota State Fair, 1900. Photo: Frances Benjamin Johnston / Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The second ancestor came from aviation. Edwin Link showed his first pilot trainer in 1929. Organ bellows from the Link family's organ factory, driven by an electric pump, made the boxy cockpit pitch and roll as the pupil worked the controls. The US Army Air Corps ordered six on 23 June 1934 at $3,500 each, and more than 500,000 US pilots trained on Link simulators during the Second World War. Motion simulators reached theme parks on 9 January 1987, when Disneyland opened Star Tours. Its Imagineers had bought four military-grade flight simulators, designed by Rediffusion Simulation in Sussex, England, at $500,000 each.

Military personnel train on Link flight simulators in San Antonio, Texas, February 1943. Photo: Robert Yarnall Richie / SMU DeGolyer Library via Wikimedia Commons (no known restrictions)

Putting a seat on a robot arm brought the two ideas together. RoboCoaster Ltd was set up in December 2000, and a year later it partnered with the German robot maker KUKA to patent and build its first ride design. In February 2003 KUKA reported that LEGOLAND Billund in Denmark had installed ten six-axis heavy-duty robots with a 500 kg carrying capacity, and called the Robocoaster the first robot in the world approved to carry human passengers. A second generation put the arms on a track. Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey opened at Universal's Islands of Adventure on 18 June 2010, with four-seat benches held by KUKA arms that travel through a show building.

A KUKA Robocoaster ride at LEGOLAND Billund, Denmark. Photo: Cmglee / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Robot arm rides in 2026, from Forbidden Journey to Stark Flight Lab

Sixteen years later, Forbidden Journey still runs in Orlando and has copies in Japan (2014), Hollywood (2016) and Beijing (2021). Heavy robots in public service need regular downtime, though. AllEars reported on 18 August 2026 that Universal will close the Orlando ride for maintenance from 8 to 19 February 2027. The next big robot arm ride is Disney's. At D23 in August 2026, Disney said Stark Flight Lab will open in 2028 at Avengers Campus in Disney California Adventure, and on 9 September Laughing Place reported a Stark Industries banner on the show building as construction goes on.

The Forbidden Journey station at Islands of Adventure, where riders board benches carried by robot arms, 2011. Photo: Orlando Informer / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Disney's design goes further than Forbidden Journey. Riders sit in two-person pods that roll along a track driven by linear synchronous motors, and then each pod is handed to a large robot arm that flies it through a simulated test flight. KTLA reported in April that 12 robot arms will work together inside the building. Imagineers also used motion capture from dancers to make the arms move more like living things, after Robert Downey Jr. compared them to DUM-E, Tony Stark's robot helper. Disney has not said who makes its arms. KUKA sells passenger versions of its heavy robots, the KR 600 R2830 for up to three riders and the KR 700 R2510 for up to four, both TÜV-certified and compliant with the European ride standard EN 13814.

The Sum of All Thrills, a robot arm ride at Epcot, in motion in 2012. Photo: Jeremy Thompson / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

ABB has no passenger-rated robot and has announced no ride project, so an ABB ride is only a possibility today. Its large robots are in the same weight class, though. The IRB 7720, launched in May 2024, carries up to 620 kg with a reach of up to 3.5 m, and ABB quotes path accuracy down to 0.6 mm at speeds up to 1,600 mm/s on its OmniCore controller. A ride builder would still need the extra certification that KUKA's passenger arms carry. ABB's software fits more easily. A ride motion can be laid out and checked for reach and speed in RobotStudio before anyone sits in a seat, and SafeMove can supervise speeds and zones on the real robot.

Engineers plan a robot cell in RobotStudio with an ABB large robot behind them. Photo: ABB

Where robot arm rides go next, at the park and at home

Stark Flight Lab puts many arms in one building and hands vehicles from a track system to the arms. It also lets dancers and animators shape the motion. KUKA's passenger robots already accept motion sequences made in animation software such as Autodesk Maya through its ready2_animate interface, so a show designer can shape the flight while engineers check that it stays inside the arm's load, speed and safety limits. Robot makers that do not sell to parks yet, ABB among them, would need two things to compete: a certified passenger arm, and tools that let people who are not programmers shape motion safely.

Two engineers program an ABB IRB 7710 or IRB 7720 large robot with a FlexPendant. Photo: ABB

Home versions already exist as hobby builds. In 2024 Hackaday wrote about Dave Niewinski, who keeps a KUKA KR 150 industrial robot in his house and fitted it with a seat, a gaming PC and a curved screen so his young children could ride roller coasters. He fed it six-axis accelerometer data recorded on real European coasters, capped the acceleration at 1 g, and fenced the arm with laser light curtains and an emergency stop. Few households will ever own a robot that size. Smaller motion seats for driving and flight games are the more likely home product, and they use the same trick of turning recorded motion into movement you feel.

A KUKA Robocoaster 4D simulator giving coaster rides at a public celebration in Munich, 2012. Photo: digital cat / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Cost and safety are the open problems, and skills come close behind. Passenger robots need ride certification on top of normal machine safety, and every arm needs maintenance time, as the 12-day Forbidden Journey closure next February shows. Designers also have to plan how to get riders down if an arm stops in mid-air. The people who build these rides need to understand show design and robot safety at once. Factories already have some of that skill: smooth, accurate motion with a heavy load at the wrist is everyday work for large ABB arms in press tending and friction stir welding, and a ride arm on a track works like a robot on external axes.

An ABB IRB 7710 or IRB 7720 robot set up for friction stir welding. Photo: ABB

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