ABB IRB 6700
Made by ABB
Photo: ABB
- mounting
- floor, inverted
- variants
- IRB 6700-235/2.65 — 235 kg / 2.65 m,IRB 6700-205/2.80 — 205 kg / 2.80 m,IRB 6700-150/3.20 — 150 kg / 3.20 m,IRB 6700-300/2.70 — 300 kg / 2.70 m
- generation
- 7th
- reach range m
- 2.6 - 3.2
- payload range kg
- 150 - 300
- repeatability mm
- 0.04 - 0.06
Who's exposed
Jobs in the threat radius
- industrial welder
- palletizer / depalletizer
- heavy parts material handler
- foundry / forging operator
- automotive body shop assembler
Deployment status
Shipping continuously since the 6700 family launched as ABB's 7th-generation large industrial robot. Deployed at scale across automotive body shops, foundries, palletizing operations, and welding cells worldwide. ABB does not publish unit counts but the IRB 6000 family is one of the most-deployed heavy-payload industrial arms in the world. Service intervals are long; this is a mature platform, not an experiment.
When this hits the labor market
Already deployed. These jobs aren't going to disappear in 1-3 years — they already mostly have, in the kinds of facilities that can afford the capital cost. What's left is the long tail: smaller fabricators, mid-sized welding shops, and palletizing operations that have stayed manual on volume economics. As the unit cost drops (or as labor cost rises), those fall too. 3-7 years for full retrofit across regional manufacturers.
Is this robot coming for your job?
Press releases speak in averages — LostJobs talks about your role. Find out which parts of your job hold up and which don't. Free.
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The robot that already took the job
The IRB 6700 family is what humanoid robots are still trying to be: a heavy-payload, high-precision industrial arm that has been deployed at scale for years. 150 to 300 kilograms of payload, 2.6 to 3.2 meters of reach, repeatability under 0.06 millimeters. It welds car bodies, palletizes pallets, hauls forgings, and assembles drivetrains. It is the 7th generation of a product family that has been quietly displacing factory labor since ABB’s industrial arm business was founded in the early 1970s.
Why this is on a humanoid catalog
Because the conversation about automation is dominated by humanoids that haven’t shipped at scale, and that misses where the actual labor displacement happens. Every car you’ve ever owned was likely welded by an arm from this family or its competitors at Fanuc, KUKA, and Yaskawa. The IRB 6700’s price ($90K base, often $105–120K landed) is what an automotive plant happily pays once for a 20-year asset that replaces three shift workers on a continuous duty cycle. The math closed decades ago for heavy-duty cells; it’s still closing now for lighter and more variable work.
Why we care for LostJobs
If your job is in heavy industrial manufacturing — welding, palletizing, foundry work, automotive body shop assembly — the IRB 6700 is the past tense of automation, not the future. The roles it eliminated were eliminated a generation ago, but the long tail (smaller shops, mid-sized fabricators, regional manufacturers who couldn’t afford the capital) is still being worked through. Watch what happens when ABB’s competitors release lower-cost variants targeted at exactly that tail. The threat to your job isn’t a Tesla Optimus — it’s a $60K depreciated IRB 6700 your shop floor finally bought used.