ABB Robotics

Products and offerings #

Who they are

This hub is for engineers who inherit ABB arms in a factory cell or who need to drive one from ROS 2. ABB Robotics is the robot division of ABB Ltd, the Zurich-based engineering group. Its lineage goes back to ASEA, one of ABB’s two predecessor companies, which delivered the IRB 6 electric industrial robot in 1974. The division had about 7,000 employees and USD 2.3 billion of revenue in 2024, according to The Robot Report.

Ownership is in flux. ABB announced plans in April 2025 to spin the division off, then on 8 October 2025 agreed instead to sell it to SoftBank Group for an enterprise value of USD 5.375 billion, with closing expected in mid-to-late 2026. In an update dated 9 November 2026, ABB said SoftBank had informed it that China’s foreign investment security review office had prohibited the acquisition of the ABB Robotics business in China. ABB said the companies were still working on the transaction, and gave no closing date, according to a reprint of that update. At the time of writing the sale has not closed.

Tooling and APIs

ABB arms run on ABB controllers. OmniCore is the current family, and the RobotWare system software on it runs programs written in RAPID, ABB’s own language. Controller features come as numbered RobotWare options, such as 689-1 for EGM and 604-2 for MultiMove Independent. You program on the teach pendant or offline in RobotStudio.

RobotStudio is the offline programming tool and includes a virtual controller, which is what the ROS 2 driver connects to in simulation. ABB’s documentation describes a free Freemium tier with basic features and no activation, a 30-day trial of the full feature set tied to one device, and a Premium licence bought through ABB sales. It runs on Windows.

For ABB’s GoFa CRB 15000 cobot family, according to ABB’s datasheet, the variants offer 5, 10 or 12 kg payload with wrist reach from 950 mm to 1520 mm, and the product specification states it can only be used with the OmniCore C30 controller. We could not confirm the axis count from ABB’s own pages, because they did not load for us at the time of writing.

We could not find a ROS 2 driver published by ABB itself at the time of writing. The community option is PickNikRobotics/abb_ros2 (Apache-2.0), released in June 2022 by PickNik Robotics with Optimax Systems and tested on an IRB 1200-5/0.9, according to The Robot Report. It is a ros2_control hardware interface built on abb_libegm. Motion goes through Externally Guided Motion (EGM), and non-real-time communication goes through Robot Web Services (RWS). The driver’s setup guide has you add RobotWare option 689-1 Externally Guided Motion (EGM) to the controller. Its README says the IRB 1200-5/0.9 was the only robot with description and configuration files as of March 2022. The repository has humble, iron and rolling branches but no Jazzy or Lyrical branch.

Pain points: the RobotStudio simulation path needs two machines, a Windows PC for RobotStudio and a Linux PC for ROS 2. Each new robot model needs its own description and MoveIt configuration. EGM settings (ports, UDP unicast, RAPID module) must match on both sides.

Migration notes

• Targets. A RAPID robtarget holds a position, an orientation as a quaternion with components q1 to q4, a configuration field and external axes, according to ABB’s PC SDK reference. That page does not state units or which component is the scalar. Check both in the RAPID reference manual for your RobotWare version, then convert to ROS metres and (x, y, z, w) at the boundary.
• Robot configuration. The configuration field (robconf, of type confdata) picks one of several inverse kinematics solutions for ambiguous axes. A ROS joint-space plan sidesteps this, but Cartesian targets copied from RAPID need the matching branch.
• Programs. RAPID has no automatic translation to ROS. Keep the cell logic in RAPID and expose a small interface (EGM for motion, RWS for signals) if the cell must stay maintainable by ABB-trained staff.
• From other makers. The general pattern is the same as with KUKA RSI and FANUC Stream Motion: a vendor option streams joint setpoints from an external PC while the controller keeps safety and servo loops.

Watch for

• Ownership change. A completed sale to SoftBank could change support terms, software licensing and regional sales channels. The Chinese prohibition adds a split between China and the rest of the world. Ask your ABB contact how existing service contracts are handled.
• Software options. EGM and MultiMove are RobotWare options that must be present on the controller. Confirm the option list, and its cost with ABB, before you plan a ROS integration.
• Third-party driver. abb_ros2 is maintained outside ABB and lags ROS releases. Budget time to port it to Jazzy or Lyrical and to add your robot model.
• Closed controller. Safety (SafeMove) and the servo loop stay in OmniCore. ROS can command motion through EGM but cannot replace the controller.