Vaccination Robot: Jet Guns, Cobi and ABB Labs

A vaccination robot sounds like science fiction, but most of the parts already exist. Jet injectors have pushed vaccines through skin without a needle since the 1950s, and in 2021 a Waterloo startup showed a robot that picked a spot on a person's arm and gave an intramuscular injection on its own. This post follows the job from the glass syringe to the jet guns of the smallpox era, then looks at today's needle-free devices and the new robotic labs that test vaccines, and asks where ABB robots could fit in clinics and factories.

A nurse vaccinates a young child with a syringe during a vaccination campaign, 2014. Photo: IBRAHOUA / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How nurses and jet guns vaccinated millions by hand

For most of history, vaccination meant a scratch or a needle in a person's hand. Edward Jenner's smallpox work in 1796 used a lancet to scratch material into the skin. In 1853 two doctors, Charles Pravaz in France and Alexander Wood in Scotland, each built a hypodermic syringe. Pravaz made his of silver and pushed the fluid with a screw. Wood used glass, so the dose could be seen and measured, and a plunger to inject it. That glass and plunger layout is still the basic shape of the syringe a nurse picks up today.

A metal hypodermic syringe made in Europe between 1871 and 1900. Photo: Wellcome Collection via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

The first try at taking the needle out was the jet injector, a gun that drives a thin, high pressure stream of liquid through the skin. In 1947 Robert Hingson and James Hughes brought the Hypospray into clinical testing. In 1959 Abram Benenson and Aaron Ismach developed the Ped-O-Jet, which became a widely used model. The US Army made jet injectors its standard for immunizations in 1961, and Hingson said he vaccinated more than 2 million people around the world with multi use nozzle guns between 1954 and 1967.

A woman receives a vaccination with a jet injector, 1976. Photo: CDC / Robert E. Bates via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Jet guns were fast enough for the smallpox eradication campaigns of the 1960s, and CDC photos from Niger in 1969 show vaccinators using them on villagers. They also carried a hidden risk. Because the same nozzle touched one arm after another, fluid could pass between people. In 1986 a clinic in Los Angeles found that 57 of 239 people who had received jet injections tested positive for hepatitis B. In 1997 the US Department of Defense stopped using jet injectors for mass vaccination because of infection concerns.

A smallpox vaccination with a jet injector in Niger, 1969. Photo: CDC via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Needle-free jets, the Cobi robot and new vaccine labs

The needle-free idea came back with single use parts. In 2014 the US Food and Drug Administration approved the PharmaJet Stratis injector for a specific flu vaccine in adults, a year after the device passed WHO quality certification. India used jet injectors in its COVID-19 campaigns. On 28 September 2026 National Geographic described how nasal sprays, inhaled insulin and jet injectors are taking needles out of medicine. It noted that FluMist, the nasal flu vaccine first approved in 2003, can now be given at home, and that fear of needles keeps some people from getting vaccines at all.

A FluMist home kit for the nasal flu vaccine, laid out with its instructions. Photo: Nathannah / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The robot that tried to do the whole job came from Cobionix, founded in 2019 by two University of Waterloo graduates. In November 2021 its robot, Cobi, gave what the university called the first autonomous intramuscular injection without a needle. Cobi could scan identity documents, find the best spot on the body and fire a jet no thicker than a human hair, with no health worker involved. Then in September 2026 the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine launched a £20 million robotic AI lab, the first of its kind in the UK, to test drugs and vaccines on human organoids. It is due to open fully in 2027.

The Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, which launched a £20 million robotic AI lab in 2026. Photo: Frombowen / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB does not sell a robot that gives vaccinations, and no source says it has built one. Its robots already work in the parts of the chain around the jab. ABB opened a healthcare research hub in Houston in 2019 to develop robots that handle samples and test tubes, and it has shown a mobile YuMi concept that moves between lab stations. GoFa CRB 15000 cobots run automated lab workstations at XtalPi. In vaccine plants, robots fill and pack vials in sterile rooms, which we covered in our post on aseptic fill and finish.

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

Where robot vaccination goes next in clinics and homes

Labs and factories will move first. Vaccine research means thousands of repeated pipetting, plating and imaging steps, work that suits liquid handlers like the ones in the Liverpool lab or a dual arm YuMi IRB 14000 at a bench. Cells like these are usually built and tested in RobotStudio before a robot touches real samples, so every vial move can be checked on screen. Our post on hospital lab automation shows how far the same approach has gone in diagnostics.

ABB's mobile YuMi concept loading test tubes into a centrifuge. Photo: ABB

The clinic is harder. A robot that injects people has to find the right muscle on bodies of every size, cope with a patient who flinches, and convince regulators it is as safe as a trained nurse. A collaborative arm such as GoFa, which limits its force and stops when it senses contact, could in principle hold a single use needle-free injector. ABB offers nothing like that today, so treat it as a possibility only. The jet gun years also left a rule for any such design: a device that touches many patients must never carry fluid from one to the next.

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

At home, the bigger change may come from the vaccine itself. Nasal sprays like FluMist, which people can now take at home, could make many clinic visits unnecessary, and that leaves robots in the background, filling vials and testing new vaccines in labs. In remote areas where nurses are scarce, a self-contained robot like Cobi could still make sense. Cost, public trust and staff training will decide how fast any of this reaches a local pharmacy, and the first robot jabs will almost certainly happen under close medical watch.

Capped vaccine vials on a production line at Shifa Pharmed near Tehran, 2021. Photo: Hamed Jafarnejad / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

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