The present work developed an automated ball-on-plate abrasive wear tester and examined the material abrasion wear resistance by volume loss and their acoustic emission characteristics. The performance of three types of materials with varying material properties, including aluminum, polyurethane-coated aluminum and stainless steel, were investigated. Friction and wear testing were carried out under different experimental conditions. To test the effect of normal load, three levels of normal load at approximately 20, 15 and 10 N and three types of lubrication conditions using water, silicone oil and no lubricant were tested. An average sliding velocity of 0.418 m/s and a test duration of 120 s were employed, achieving a total sliding distance of 50.2 m. Two types of acoustic emission data were acquired, including continuous data at 50 Hz and bursts data at 10 MHz. The investigations found that the volume loss due to sliding abrasion for aluminum and stainless steel was inversely proportional to the hardness and proportional to the normal load, which is consistent with the Archard’s equation. Polyurethane, when used as a protective film on aluminum, reduced volume loss due to its high elastic deformability. Overall, stainless steel showed the least volume loss and, thus, the highest abrasion wear resistance, with polyurethane being less and aluminum the least wear resistant. This was likely due to stainless steel having greater hardness than the other two types of materials examined. In addition, AE RMS analysis, FFT transformation and correlation with friction force was performed for 50 Hz continuous data, showing a positive correlation between kinetic friction and delayed onset of AE. For the 10 MHz burst data, FFT power spectra in dB scale was obtained and compared for different test conditions. Variance, skewness, and kurtosis were calculated on an assumed beta distribution and plotted against time. Furthermore, the Hilbert-Huang transform was applied to the burst data acquired at 40 s, demonstrating patterns in the Hilbert spectra characteristic of material type, normal load and lubrication conditions, and also showing a correlation between volume wear and instantaneous energy. These AE characteristics can potentially be used for abrasion wear monitoring.