Balaenoptera robusta was named by Lilljeborg (1861). It is extant. Its type specimen is University Museum of Upsala, a partial skeleton. Its type locality is Graso, which is in a Holocene coastal sandstone/claystone in Sweden.

It was recombined as Megaptera (Eschrichtius) robusta by Gray (1864); it was recombined as Plesiocetus robustus by Brandt (1874), Trouessart (1898) and Trouessart (1904); it was synonymized subjectively with Balaena gibbosa by Van Deinse (1937); it was synonymized subjectively with Eschrichtius gibbosus by Hershkovitz (1966); it was considered an invalid subgroup of Eschrichtius by Marx and Fordyce (2015); it was recombined as Eschrichtius robustus by Gray (1865), Gray (1866), Gray (1868), Gray (1871), Barnes (1977), Mead and Mitchell (1984), Vidal (1991), Rice (1998), Mead and Brownell (2005), Bisconti and Varola (2006), Bouetel and Muizon (2006), Agnarsson and May-Collado (2008), Uhen et al. (2008), Marx (2011), Geisler et al. (2011), Tsai et al. (2014), Gol'din and Steeman (2015), Tsai and Boessenecker (2015), Garrison et al. (2019) and Fleming et al. (2022).