The UK and Ireland arm of the Swiss-Swedish robotics group ABB, based in Milton Keynes, helping factories use industrial and collaborative robots.
ABB Robotics UK & Ireland sells, supports and teaches people to use industrial robots. These are the robot arms and moving machines that weld car parts, pack food, move boxes in warehouses and tend other machines. ABB's UK team works with factories of all sizes, and its open day in May 2025 showed robot cells for arc welding, machine tending, fast picking and packing, autonomous mobile robots and automated logistics. It also showed GoFa collaborative robots (cobots, which are designed to work safely next to people), including a cell built for the pharmaceutical industry, and AI-enabled robots.
The company's stated aim, reported at the 2025 open day, is to help UK and Irish businesses become more competitive through automation, to "boost productivity and open new pathways to becoming more sustainable". An earlier 2016 article quoted sales and marketing manager Mike Wilson saying the goal is that "every business that could benefit from a robot is able to do so". In that spirit ABB invested more than 250,000 pounds in its UK robot training centre in 2016. These are the company's own statements.
ABB's UK robotics base is a Customer Experience Centre in Milton Keynes, which also houses the training centre at Auriga House. Alan Conn is the managing director of ABB Robotics UK & Ireland, as named in the 2025 report. The centre is where customers see robots working, try programming them and take courses. Beyond Milton Keynes, we could not confirm other ABB Robotics sites from the pages we read, so we have not listed any.
The training centre offers courses such as an integrator course on setting up and installing a robot, and a YuMi course on fitting this small two-armed cobot into a production cell. ABB also offers RobotStudio, software that lets engineers program and test a robot on a computer before it is installed, plus augmented and virtual reality viewers, a factory management tool called OptiFact and robot refurbishment. The target industries include food and drink and healthcare as well as the traditional car factories. No culture statements were found, so none are given here.
A robotics company like this needs more than robot engineers. There are application engineers who design the robot cell for a customer, programmers, service and maintenance engineers who keep robots running, trainers, sales and marketing staff, and project managers. If you like maths, physics, computing, design or hands-on problem solving, factory automation is a growing area that touches almost every industry. ABB's Milton Keynes centre is a good place to see this kind of work in action.
Website: new.abb.com/products/robotics
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