Smart Home Robot: From Blind Cords to ABB free@home

Opening the blinds is one of the oldest chores in a house, and it is also one of the first that people tried to automate. A smart home robot for blinds can be a tubular motor hidden in the roller, a wall panel on a building bus, or a small battery gadget that presses a switch or turns a tilt wand for you. This post follows window coverings from pull cords and cranks to motorised blinds and KNX wiring, then to retrofit robots such as SwitchBot. It also looks at ABB's own home automation, ABB-free@home and ABB i-bus KNX, and where ABB robot arms fit in.

Venetian blinds half open in winter, with icicles hanging outside the window. Photo: Kotivalo / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From pull cords to the first blind motors

For most of their history, Venetian blinds were moved by hand. A cord lifts the stack of slats and another cord or a wand tilts them, so someone has to walk to every window twice a day. Offices took them up widely in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to control light and air, and the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center in New York, finished in the 1930s, used them on a large scale. Vertical blinds followed in 1948. The cords stayed, and they turned out to be dangerous for small children.

An old slatted roll blind with its pull cords on a house in Xulilla, Valencia. Photo: KaiKemmann / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Motors arrived from a different direction. Somfy, a French company founded in 1969, built its business on drives and controls for blinds, awnings, roller shutters and garage doors. A tubular motor sits inside the roller tube, and a wall switch with up, stop and down buttons replaces the strap or the crank. Once a blind runs on a motor, a timer, a sun sensor or a remote can move it, and the cord can go, which later mattered for child safety too.

A Somfy wall switch with up, stop and down buttons for a motorised blind. Photo: larsjuh / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

The next step was to wire blinds into the building itself. KNX is an open standard for home and building automation that grew out of three earlier European systems, the European Installation Bus (EIB), BatiBUS and the European Home Systems Protocol. Its devices usually share a twisted pair bus laid next to the mains cables, and one bus can handle lighting, blinds and shutters, heating, security and energy management. The KNX Association, which runs the standard, was formed in 1999. ABB sells its own KNX range as ABB i-bus KNX: actuators, sensors and controllers that sit in the distribution board and on the wall.

A KNX actuator made for mounting on a DIN rail in the distribution board. Photo: Phiarc / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Switch pushers, curtain robots and ABB-free@home today

Most homes have no bus wiring, and that gap made room for retrofit robots. SwitchBot started in Shenzhen, where Woan Technology was registered in 2015. Its first product, the SwitchBot Bot, went to Kickstarter in late 2016 at $19 and raised $72,311 from 667 backers. It is a small box that sticks next to a wall switch or a coffee machine button and presses it on command from a phone. The Curtain robot followed in 2019, and in 2022 the Blind Tilt, a motor that clamps around the tilt wand of existing Venetian blinds and charges from a small solar panel on the glass.

SwitchBot Bot switch pushers on sale in a Japanese electronics store. Photo: whity / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Window cords are in the news again because October is National Window Covering Safety Month in the United States. The CPSC counted about 184 infants and young children strangled in window cords between 1996 and 2012, and since a 2018 industry standard, stock blinds sold in stores should be cordless or have cords out of reach. On 1 October 2026 a Houston blinds dealer used the month to offer discounts on replacing old corded coverings, and in late August USA Today called automatic blinds possibly the smartest purchase of the fall.

The lift cord of a pleated shade, laid out during a restringing job. Photo: Tomwsulcer / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

ABB's home business works through the wiring. ABB-free@home, whose app appeared in July 2014 and which Busch-Jaeger, an ABB brand from Lüdenscheid, sells as Busch-free@home, controls blinds, lights, heating, air conditioning, scenes and door communication from switches, panels or a phone, with wired and wireless versions. None of this needs a robot arm. ABB's robots show up one step back, in labs and factories. At the Sidia institute in Manaus, Brazil, engineers used a dual-arm YuMi to run Android sensor tests on phones, a job close to what a switch pusher does, as our post on smartphone testing robots describes.

ABB's dual arm YuMi IRB 14000 working beside a lab technician. Photo: ABB

Where home automation and robots meet next

The likely path for most homes is mixed. New builds and renovations get motors and bus or radio controls, and older flats get clip-on gadgets that press, turn or pull what is already there. SwitchBot's 2026 releases point that way: besides locks and lights, the company launched the K11+ Pro robot vacuum in September. Hubs that bridge to Matter let one app run devices from several brands, which is what an ABB-free@home installation already does inside one wiring system. The open question is who keeps all of it updated for twenty years.

A SwitchBot Hub 3 acting as a Matter bridge next to a smart speaker. Photo: Japanwikisan / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

A general purpose home robot that walks to the window and pulls the cord is still a research idea. Cobots such as ABB's GoFa CRB 15000 show some of what that would need: torque sensors in every joint, speed limits near people and a stop on contact. ABB does not sell GoFa for homes, so it is only a hint of the safety work involved. A robot that shares a bedroom with a toddler would face the same strangulation and pinching risks that made the cords a problem in the first place.

ABB's GoFa cobot is guided by hand and stops when it senses contact. Photo: ABB

Cost and skills will decide how far this goes. A motorised blind costs much more than a corded one, a KNX system needs a trained installer, and retrofit robots run on batteries that someone has to charge or replace. Programming is getting easier on both sides: home apps use scenes and timers, and on ABB's cobots Wizard easy programming lets staff build tasks from graphical blocks, as described on our page about how to control robots with no code. For now, the blind that closes itself at sunset is the part of the smart home that already works in ordinary houses.

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

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