Bon Jovi Put Five Industrial Robots on a Rock Stage
On February 19, 2010, Bon Jovi opened The Circle Tour at Seattle’s KeyArena with five machines lined up behind the band that normally belonged somewhere very different.
They were ABB IRB 7600 industrial robots.
Each robot carried a 6 × 9-foot LED video panel on its articulated arm. During the concert, the five machines could independently reposition those screens, assemble them into a single continuous video wall—and, in one of the production’s most unusual transformations, arrange them into a staircase for Jon Bon Jovi.
When he stepped onto that staircase, power to the robots was locked so they physically could not move beneath him.
This wasn’t a video wall with automation added to it. The robots were the video wall.
A Factory Machine Had to Learn a Different Job
The IRB 7600 was not invented for concerts. It is a heavy-duty industrial robot designed for tasks such as material handling in manufacturing environments.
For The Circle Tour, however, each machine received a RoboScreen system and an LED panel. Instead of manipulating industrial components, its articulated arm manipulated imagery.
The screens displayed both live camera feeds and animation while their physical positions changed with the show. Approximately 85% of the screen material was live IMAG, while the remainder included pre-programmed 3D graphics and real-time computer-generated imagery reacting to the music.
The result changed the fundamental question behind concert video. Normally: What should we put on the screen? Here there was another question: Where should the screen physically be?
Five Screens Could Become One
The simplest transformation may have been the most effective. Five separate robots could align their panels and create one continuous five-screen image. Then they could separate again.
One large picture became five individual pictures. The screens could turn. Rise. Lower. Tilt. Recombine.
That gave the production something conventional LED walls could not easily provide in 2010: physical editing.
Normally, a media server changes the composition inside a fixed rectangle. The Circle Tour could change the rectangle itself.
The video system was therefore performing two kinds of content simultaneously. Digital content existed on the screen. Mechanical content existed in the movement of the screen.
Then the Video Wall Became a Staircase
This is where the design crossed an important boundary. The RoboScreens were not restricted to displaying pictures. They could be positioned so their structures formed individual steps leading toward an elevated performance position.
Jon Bon Jovi could climb them. At that moment, something designed as video equipment became scenic architecture.
And because a human being was now physically interacting with machinery capable of large automated movements, the safety logic changed completely. The robots could no longer simply receive the next movement cue. They had to become immovable.
The system therefore locked robot power while Bon Jovi occupied the staircase. Spotters, warning lights, guarded safety zones and emergency-stop controls were also incorporated around the robotic system.
The audience saw a staircase appear. Production saw five industrial robots entering a temporary human-load condition.
The Most Important Robotic Cue Was “Do Not Move”
This reveals something essential about stage automation. Spectacular movement attracts attention. Safe stillness rarely does.
But when a performer climbs onto machinery, the most important capability can become preventing movement rather than creating it.
The Circle Tour system used spotters around the robotic operating area. Warning lights indicated zones that performers and crew needed to avoid, emergency stops were distributed around the safety area, and security personnel kept unauthorized people outside those zones.
That infrastructure was invisible to most spectators. It had to be. The audience needed to believe the screens were moving effortlessly around the musicians. The crew needed to know exactly when they could not.
Twelve Other Video Columns Created a Different Problem
The five robots were only part of the moving video environment. The production also used 12 moving video columns over the stage. And those columns introduced an unexpected problem: they moved too much.
Not intentionally. They oscillated. A video surface suspended above a stage can continue to sway after movement stops. That may be acceptable for a lighting fixture, but video exposes movement brutally. A supposedly stable image that keeps drifting becomes distracting.
The production therefore added RSC Lightlock motion-damping units to the bottoms of the 12 video columns. The technology was originally developed to stabilize moving lights. On Bon Jovi, it was repurposed to stabilize video. Fifty Lightlock units were manufactured, tested and shipped in time for the tour.
This is an excellent example of production engineering solving a problem the concept drawings rarely reveal. Designers wanted moving screens. Physics answered: fine—but they will swing.
A Moving Screen Is Useless If the Audience Can’t Read It
This distinction becomes particularly important with IMAG. Remember: roughly 85% of the RoboScreen content consisted of live camera imagery.
A graphic animation can tolerate some distortion or movement. A close-up of Jon Bon Jovi’s face cannot.
The entire purpose of IMAG is to compensate for distance. A spectator at the far end of an arena looks toward a screen because the human figure onstage is too small. If the screen itself becomes visually unstable, production has solved one problem and created another.
This explains why motion control and video engineering became inseparable on The Circle Tour. It was not enough to move the image spectacularly. The image still had to function as an image.
Then the Tour Walked Outside
When The Circle Tour expanded into stadiums, the visual problem changed. An arena-scale system that feels enormous indoors can become surprisingly small when placed at one end of a 60,000-seat stadium.
Doug “Spike” Brant and the TAIT team answered with a new visual object: a gigantic arched video wall. It measured approximately 115 feet wide and 50 feet high. Its surface contained more than 4,000 square feet of video and over 750,000 pixels.
But the most interesting number may be eight weeks. That is how long TAIT says it took to build the screen system.
4,000 Square Feet of Video Had to “Fold Into a Hamper”
A stadium video wall can be spectacular when assembled. Touring production has another question: what does it look like when the show is over?
TAIT vice president Adam Davis described the enormous elliptical screen with a wonderfully practical observation: it essentially folded down into a hamper.
That sentence contains an entire touring philosophy. The audience evaluates a stage when it is open. Production evaluates it when it is open and when it is closed.
A 115-foot-wide screen that requires an unreasonable number of trucks, excessive labour or impossible assembly time is not necessarily good touring design. Pack volume is part of the design. Truck space is part of the design. Assembly sequence is part of the design.
The spectacular object has to possess a second identity: freight.
The Arch Wasn’t Really an IMAG Screen
A screen that large could easily have become nothing more than a giant television. Brant and the design team resisted that.
Davis explained that the arch was intended to be atmospheric rather than simply supplying image magnification for tens of thousands of spectators.
This is an important distinction. IMAG answers: What does the performer look like? Scenic video answers: What does this moment feel like?
The same LED surface can perform both jobs. But those jobs require different compositions. A giant close-up may be perfect for someone sitting 100 metres away. The same close-up can destroy an otherwise carefully composed stage picture.
The Circle production therefore had to negotiate constantly between information and atmosphere.
The Screen Had to Become Part of the Building
The elliptical form helped. Instead of appearing as a rectangular television attached behind a rock band, the arch extended upward and around the performance area. Video became architecture.
This also changed how the band occupied the picture. The musicians were not merely standing in front of content. They appeared contained within it.
That difference is subtle but powerful. A rectangle behind a performer establishes two visual layers: performer, screen. An architectural video surface can make the entire stage read as one environment.
That principle would become increasingly common during the following decade as LED technology became more structurally integrated into touring scenery.
The Robots Had to Tour Like Rock Musicians
Industrial robots normally work under remarkably controlled conditions. A factory floor does not disappear every night. The robot is not normally loaded into a truck after work, transported hundreds of kilometres and installed in a different building.
The Circle Tour demanded exactly that. TAIT designed and integrated the rigging system that allowed the five RoboScreens to fit into the touring platform.
TAIT’s team modelled not just the stage and show elements but also how components would be packed, transported, unpacked and assembled.
That is the moment an industrial technology becomes touring technology. It is no longer enough for it to work. It has to work after yesterday’s load-out. After today’s truck ride. After today’s load-in. Then tomorrow. Again.
The Robots Didn’t Decide When to Move
The machinery looked autonomous. It wasn’t. Movement sequences were programmed into the show-control system. At the appropriate moment, an operator triggered the programmed sequence for a song.
That distinction matters because stage automation is not industrial automation transplanted unchanged. In a factory, repetition is often the objective. Concert automation must repeat reliably while remaining synchronized to performance.
Music provides timing. Video provides another layer. Lighting provides another. Human performers introduce variability. The machinery has to appear choreographed with all of them.
Five robots can perform exactly the same mechanical movement every night. The song surrounding that movement still has to feel alive.
This Wasn’t a Robot Demonstration
The danger with spectacular technology is that audiences begin watching the technology instead of the concert. Bon Jovi’s design avoided that by giving the robots recognizable scenic jobs.
Sometimes they were screens. Sometimes individual visual objects. Sometimes one large screen. Sometimes stairs. Their movement changed according to what the show needed.
That is much more effective than asking five industrial robots to wave around simply because five industrial robots look impressive. The technology earned its place by changing function.
The Show Had to Work for People Who Couldn’t See the Robots Clearly
Scale introduces another contradiction. The audience closest to the stage can appreciate the physical choreography of five robot arms. Someone much farther away may primarily perceive the resulting screen composition.
That means the design had to work at two resolutions. Up close: mechanical detail. Far away: large geometry.
The five panels joining together could satisfy both. Nearby spectators understood how it happened. Distant spectators understood what happened.
This is one reason repetition is so useful in stadium design. Five identical objects create a pattern large enough to survive distance.
Then a Machine Built for Repetition Created Variety
This is perhaps the most elegant contradiction in the production. Industrial robots exist partly because they can perform repeatable movements with extraordinary consistency. Concert design normally wants the opposite visual result: change. Surprise. Transformation.
The Circle Tour used repeatability as the engineering foundation for variety. Because the robots could reliably arrive at programmed positions, the designers could create multiple stage configurations.
Precision made transformation possible. The factory principle had not disappeared. It had simply been reassigned to entertainment.
The Circle Tour Became a Bridge to Bon Jovi’s Next Generation of Stages
Three years later, Doug “Spike” Brant described The Circle Tour as an important step toward the far more kinetic environment of Bon Jovi’s Because We Can production.
He explained that the team’s ongoing design philosophy centered on transformation—allowing a relatively open stage to reveal itself gradually as the concert progressed.
That lineage matters. Concert technology rarely arrives as one isolated breakthrough. A moving video idea creates experience. That experience reveals problems. Problems generate engineering solutions. Those solutions become tools for the next tour.
On The Circle Tour, video learned to move. On later Bon Jovi productions, the entire performance environment increasingly learned to transform.
The Most Important Screen Was Never a Screen
Five ABB robots. Five LED panels. Twelve moving video columns. A 115-foot stadium arch. Thousands of square feet of video. More than 750,000 pixels.
Those numbers make The Circle Tour sound like a story about screens. It isn’t.
It is a story about what happens when the screen stops being a fixed destination for content. Once video could move physically, it could become scenery. Once it became scenery, performers could interact with it. Once performers could climb onto it, automation became a safety system. Once the same idea moved outdoors, it had to become architecture.
The screen had escaped the rectangle.
Editor’s Take — IMMERSIVE LAB
The Circle Tour is valuable because its technology was caught between two eras. Concert video was already essential, but LED had not yet become the enormous architectural skin we now routinely see on stadium tours. Bon Jovi’s production found another path: make the screen itself perform. Five industrial robots turned pixels into moving scenic objects, while the stadium arch demonstrated how video could become architecture without becoming merely a giant television.
The enduring production lesson is not “use robots.” It is more useful than that: when a technology can change function during a show, it stops being equipment and starts becoming part of the storytelling.
Next in LIVE STAGE: David Bowie — Glass Spider Tour, where a 60-foot-high spider, hydraulic legs, dancers, video and theatrical staging turned a rock concert into a travelling architectural spectacle.
References & Further Reading
ABB / Automation.com — Five ABB robots take the stage with Bon Jovi
andyRobot — Bon Jovi Circle Tour RoboScreen production
PLSN — The Circle Tour’s 115-foot stadium video arch
ETNow — RoboScreen video system and TAIT integration
ETNow — RSC Lightlock stabilization on The Circle Tour
Live Design — Bon Jovi production-design evolution
