Robotic X-Ray System: From Röntgen to ABB Robots

Every X-ray picture needs two things lined up around a patient: the tube that makes the beam and the detector that catches it. For most of the last 130 years, a radiographer has done that lining up by hand, pulling a heavy tube along ceiling rails and sliding a cassette or panel behind the body. A robotic X-ray system hands part of that job to motors and robot arms. This post covers how diagnostic X-ray rooms worked before robots, the first robot-arm imaging systems, what changed in 2026, and where ABB's robots could fit as the job moves toward small clinics and even homes.

A patient lies on the table under a ceiling-mounted tube in a hospital digital radiography room. Photo: Ptrump16 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How radiographers lined up tubes and plates by hand

Wilhelm Röntgen found X-rays in Würzburg in November 1895, and on 22 December he made the famous picture of his wife Anna Bertha's hand. Within months, doctors and photographers were building their own rooms. The equipment was crude: a glass tube on a wooden stand, a glass photographic plate, and an operator who set the distance by eye. Early workers often checked the beam on their own hands. Clarence Dally, a glassblower who worked on X-ray tubes for Thomas Edison, lost both arms to radiation burns and died in 1904. By the First World War, military hospitals such as the Kitchener Hospital in Brighton used X-ray rooms to find bullets and shrapnel in wounded soldiers.

The X-ray room of the Kitchener Hospital in Brighton, England, 1915, where staff located bullets in wounded soldiers. Photo: H. D. Girdwood, British Library via Wikimedia Commons (no known restrictions)

Moving the machine to the patient came early too. During the First World War, Marie Curie fitted cars with X-ray tubes and generators so that wounded soldiers near the front could be imaged without a long transport, and she learned to drive one herself. Soldiers called the cars "petites Curies". The work was still manual. Someone had to unload the gear, aim the tube, place the plate under the patient and develop the image. That pattern, a skilled person physically aiming a heavy tube at a body, stayed at the centre of radiography for most of the century.

Marie Curie at the wheel of one of her mobile X-ray cars, around 1915. Photo: unknown author via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Engineering slowly took the weight off the radiographer. Tubes moved onto floor columns and then onto ceiling rails with counterweights and electric brakes, and the grid Gustav Bucky designed in 1913 cut down scattered radiation. Digital detectors replaced film from the late 1990s. Real robot arms arrived later. At the RSNA meeting in 2007, Siemens showed Artis zeego, an angiography system whose C-arm rides on a six-axis industrial robot from KUKA; a Siemens manager compared it to car-factory welding robots. In December 2015 the FDA cleared Siemens' Multitom Rax, with two ceiling-mounted robot arms, one for the tube and one for the detector. The University of Utah installed the first US unit in 2016.

A technician sets up an X-ray tube on its column stand over a patient at Clinch Valley Hospital, Virginia, 1946. Photo: Russell Lee, US National Archives via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Where robotic X-ray stands in 2026

Most hospitals still buy rooms where the radiographer pushes the tube, but more of the moves are motorised. In September 2026 Carestream Healthcare International launched STARVIEW, a floor-mounted digital room with a wireless 43 x 43 cm detector, a touchscreen on the tube head and a detector tray that tracks the tube automatically. It is aimed at sites still moving off film or computed radiography. The same month Globus Medical won a CE mark for Excelsius3D, a mobile unit on omnidirectional wheels that combines cone-beam CT, fluoroscopy and plain radiography and works alongside the ExcelsiusGPS surgical robot.

A ceiling-mounted X-ray tube with its positioning light on, facing a wall stand detector, on a Philips DigitalDiagnost C90. Photo: Hg6996 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB does not make X-ray equipment, and no source says an ABB robot positions an X-ray tube in a hospital today. Its medical work so far is in labs and factories. In October 2019 ABB opened a healthcare research hub at the Texas Medical Center Innovation Institute in Houston to automate repetitive hospital lab work, with YuMi and GoFa robots handling samples. Our post on ABB robots in hospital labs covers that work. In Helsinki, GE Healthcare uses a single-arm YuMi IRB 14050 to put glue beads on small sensor parts on its prototype line.

A GoFa cobot at ABB's healthcare research hub, where ABB works on hospital lab automation. Photo: ABB

Could an ABB arm hold an X-ray tube or detector? Nobody sells such a system, so this is only a possibility. A GoFa CRB 15000 cobot has torque sensors in all six joints and stops when it feels unexpected contact, which matters when a heavy detector swings near a patient's head. SafeMove can fence off zones in software, so an arm slows or stops near the table. The other route is the one Siemens took with a KUKA arm, where a larger industrial robot, such as an ABB IRB model, is built into a certified medical system. Engineers would plan the reach and collision zones in RobotStudio before any hardware went into a room.

A single-arm YuMi IRB 14050 in its cell on GE Healthcare's prototype line in Helsinki. Photo: ABB

What comes next for robot arms around the X-ray table

The home side of this story starts with portable X-ray. Battery units small enough to carry into a care home or a patient's living room already exist, and in September 2026 SU Group announced exclusive rights to distribute a portable X-ray system in Hong Kong and Macau. Aiming them is still a manual job, done by a radiographer who has to keep everyone else out of the beam. A small robot arm on a mobile base could someday hold the detector steady behind a bedridden patient, guided by a radiographer on site or watching remotely, much like the remote ideas in our robotic ultrasound post.

A US Air Force imaging technician lines up a Siemens portable X-ray machine by hand on a mock patient, 2009. Photo: Senior Airman Chris Hubenthal, US Air Force via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

In hospitals, the likely next step is more automatic positioning: the tube and detector move to a stored position for a chest or knee exam, a camera checks the patient's pose, and the radiographer confirms the shot. Weight-bearing 3D scans of knees and spines, which Multitom Rax made possible in a standing patient, could spread to more rooms. Cobot arms like GoFa, which can be guided by hand, suit this kind of shared work, because the radiographer can push the arm into place and let the robot hold it there.

Moving a GoFa cobot arm by hand. Torque sensors in its joints let it feel the push. Photo: ABB

The open problems are cost, safety and skills. A twin-robot X-ray room costs far more than a manual room, and small hospitals buying systems like STARVIEW are choosing simpler upgrades for now. Any robot in a medical room must pass medical device rules, and an arm that moves near a patient needs collision checks that factory cells never face. Radiographers will need training to set up and trust automatic moves. ABB's mobile YuMi concept for hospital labs shows one way a robot could travel between rooms. Putting one beside an X-ray table would take a medical partner and years of testing.

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

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