Tile Laying Robot: From Mortar Beds to ABB Arms

A tiled floor looks simple until you watch it go down. The tiler spreads mortar, sets each tile, taps it level with its neighbors, checks the joints and does it again thousands of times on their knees. A tile laying robot tries to take over that loop of spreading, placing and leveling. This post follows tiling from glazed bricks and mortar beds through the first research robots of the 1990s, looks at the floor tiling robots now sold in China and the screeding robots Singapore is adding to public housing sites, and asks where ABB robots, already at work in ceramics factories, could fit.

A US Navy Seabee spreads mortar before placing floor tiles at a clinic in An Khe, Vietnam, 2007. Photo: U.S. Navy / Patrick M. Kearney via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

How tilers set floors and walls by hand

People have set glazed tiles for thousands of years. The Ishtar Gate of Babylon, built around 575 BCE, was faced with glazed and molded bricks showing dragons and bulls, and a reconstruction now stands in Berlin's Pergamon Museum. Roman builders laid floors of small stone pieces by hand. For most of that history the method stayed the same: a bed of mortar, a tile pressed into it, and a craftsman's eye to keep the lines straight and the surface flat. The quality depended almost entirely on the person doing it.

A dragon in glazed and molded bricks from Babylon's Ishtar Gate, Pergamon Museum, Berlin. Photo: Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Until after the Second World War, most tiles were set by the thick bed or mud set method, in a deep layer of sand and cement mortar that the tiler leveled by hand. Then thinset arrived, an adhesive mortar of cement, fine sand and a water retaining additive that is spread only a few millimeters thick with a notched trowel. It used less material and labor and gave flatter results. It also let tile go over concrete, plywood and backer board, and it helped make ceramic tile common in kitchens and bathrooms in the second half of the twentieth century.

Tilers at work on a wall and floor in East Germany, 1979. Photo: Eugen Nosko / Deutsche Fotothek via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE)

The first robots came from universities. In 1996 Dimitrios Apostolopoulos and Hagen Schempf at Carnegie Mellon University described a mobile robot for installing floor tiles that found its position with laser triangulation and counted the tiles it had already laid. The same year, a student project at the University of Florida built TileBot, which set square tiles to match a pattern stored in memory. A 2014 paper by Harvard's Design Robotics Group, titled "Robotic tile placement: Tools, techniques and feasibility", studied how industrial arms could place tiles. None of these became a product.

Pressing a floor tile into fresh mortar with a trowel in Villacorta, Spain, 2012. Photo: Francisco Gonzalez / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Why floor tiling robots are reaching real sites

China took tiling robots onto job sites first. Bright Dream Robotics in Foshan built a floor tile paving robot that lifts each tile with vacuum grippers, applies the mortar and lays it using four cameras to line it up. It won a Red Dot design award in 2022. Its former CEO, Kecheng Wang, founded Partner Robotics in 2023, and in November 2025 that company raised a Series A round for its P900 floor tile robot. Partner Robotics says the P900 works five to six times faster than a person and can pay for itself in about six months of continuous use.

A tiler spreads adhesive with a notched trowel before laying floor tiles, 2015. Photo: Lahoucine Boukhanchouch / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Other places are starting with the floor underneath. On September 25, 2026, Singapore's National Development Minister Chee Hong Tat said the Housing and Development Board would extend trials of screeding robots to at least four more Build To Order projects in 2027, The Straits Times reported. The robots use lasers as a guide to level and smooth floors before tiles or vinyl go down. Two of them have already worked in 80 flats in Bukit Merah and Ghim Moh. A flat, level screed is half of a good tiled floor, and it is the half a robot handles most easily.

Workers lay large format slabs with a vacuum lifter at the Donauhalle in Ulm, Germany, 2008. Photo: Alexander Eichler / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

ABB robots do not lay tiles on building sites, but they already handle ceramics in factories. At Wade Ceramics in Stoke-on-Trent, ABB IRB 1600 robots with vision systems place each flagon at the entry to the first kiln, spaced so neighbors do not fuse during firing. That is close to the skill a tiling robot needs: find a piece, set it in an exact spot and leave an even gap. Our post on ceramics glazing robots covers that line, and ABB's IRB 460 and IRB 660 palletizers stack heavy cartons at the end of many production lines.

An ABB robot places flagons before the first firing at Wade Ceramics in Stoke-on-Trent. Photo: ABB

What tiling robots still have to learn

In factories, the obvious next step is prefabrication. Bathroom pods and wall panels can be tiled flat on a table before they are shipped, which suits a fixed industrial arm far better than a crowded room. An ABB IRB 6700 could lift large format porcelain slabs that two tilers struggle to carry, and a cell like that would be planned in RobotStudio from the same 3D model the designer drew. No ABB customer has announced a tiling cell like this, so it remains a possibility. Our post on robot bricklaying shows how far the related masonry work has come.

An ABB IRB 660 palletizing robot stacking boxes at the end of a line. Photo: ABB

Homes are harder. Floor robots work best in big, open, repetitive spaces such as station halls, apartment blocks and offices, and most of the Chinese machines are built for those. Bathrooms and kitchens are small, full of corners, drains and pipes, and every tile around the edge has to be cut to fit. Wall tiles add gravity, since each piece has to stay put while the adhesive sets. A cobot such as ABB's GoFa CRB 15000, which senses contact and can be guided by hand, could hold or press tiles beside a tiler, though nobody sells such a setup today.

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

Cost and skills will decide how fast this happens. A robot that pays back in six months on a large floor will not pay back on a single bathroom, and someone still has to set it up, feed it tiles and finish the cuts. Tilers also check their work by tapping for hollow spots and running a hand over the joints to feel uneven edges, checks a robot has to learn as well. For now the most likely pattern is the one Singapore is testing, with robots taking the heavy, flat, repetitive work of screeding and large floors while people keep the corners and the details.

Workers on a ceramic tile line at the worker-run Zanon (FaSinPat) factory in Neuquen, Argentina, 2005. Photo: Guglielmo Celata / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

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