Blister Packing Robot: ABB Robots in Pharma Lines

Most tablets you buy today come in a blister: a strip of plastic pockets sealed with printed foil, one pill per pocket. Making those packs is fast, precise work, and the slow points are usually where blisters move between machines and into cartons. A blister packing robot picks finished blisters off a belt, stacks them and feeds them into a cartoner, or packs the cartons into shipping cases. This post follows the job from pharmacists counting pills by hand to the first blister machines in 1960s Germany, then looks at robots on today's lines and where ABB arms fit.

Blister packs of tablets, each pill sealed in its own foil backed pocket. Photo: Tarasna0922 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From counting trays to the first blister machines

For most of the history of pharmacy, tablets were counted by hand. A pharmacist tipped pills onto a tray, counted them with a spatula and poured them into a glass bottle, a tin or a small paper or card box marked with the shop's name. Drug makers filled bottles by machine, but the patient still took pills from a shared container, and nothing showed whether a dose had been missed. Counting was slow and open to mistakes, and every time the bottle was opened the remaining tablets met air and moisture again.

Rep. Carl T. Durham, who ran a drug store in Chapel Hill, at a pharmacy counter in 1939. Photo: Harris & Ewing, Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Much of the early machine work happened in southern Germany. Uhlmann, founded in 1948 in Laupheim, launched what it calls the world's first universal strip packaging machine in 1956. It sealed tablets between two layers of film, so each one was protected from dirt and moisture in a long strip. In 1963 Uhlmann followed with its KP series, the first of its machines to form a separate pocket for every tablet. That is the blister pack most people know, with a formed plastic web and a lidding foil you push the pill through.

Paper pill boxes from 19th century England, the kind of container pills were dispensed in before blisters. Photo: Wellcome Collection via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Timing helped. The lidding foil could be printed with the day of each dose, which suited medicines taken in a fixed order, above all the birth control pill that was spreading worldwide at the time. Uhlmann says this created a mass market for blister packaging. Blister lines grew into long machines that heat and form the plastic, fill the pockets, seal the foil, punch out the cards and push them into folding cartons. For decades, though, people still did much of the handling around them: loading leaflets, moving stacks of blisters, checking print and packing cartons into cases.

Birth control pill blister packs printed with the days of the week. Photo: Ceridwen / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0 FR)

Robots, vision and serialised cartons today

Today robots mostly work at those transfer points. Delta robots pick blisters from a conveyor and place them in stacks or straight into cartoner buckets, with cameras that find each card and reject faulty ones. Articulated arms pack cartons into shipping cases and stack the cases on pallets. Serialisation has added steps. Since February 2019 the EU Falsified Medicines Directive has required a unique code and tamper evidence on most prescription packs, so every carton is printed, scanned and logged, and cases and pallets are linked to the cartons inside them.

A carton of tablets with three blister packs, the format robots load into cartoners. Photo: BlankEclair / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

In South Korea, Yuyu Pharma said on 1 September 2026 that it had been selected for the Advanced Manufacturing Robot Demonstration Project, run by the Korea Institute for Robot Industry Advancement. At its Jecheon plant it will automate secondary packaging for its omega soft capsule products, with AI vision inspection, multi vision aggregation, boxing by articulated robots, and new cartoners, sealers and labelling machines. The programme offers up to 200 million won in government funding. Chief executive Noyong Park expects higher productivity, fewer defects and lower costs, along with fewer musculoskeletal injuries among staff.

ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker robots packing small items at high speed. Photo: ABB

ABB has robots for each of those transfer points. The IRB 360 FlexPicker is a delta robot built for fast picking from a moving belt, and with PickMaster software and a camera it finds and places items as they arrive, using conveyor tracking. At a pharmaceutical plant near Melbourne, integrator Andrew Donald Design Engineering added a FlexPicker that picks correctly labelled blow fill seal bottles and places them in blister packs. The small IRB 1200, which also comes in a Hygienic version for food, or a GoFa CRB 15000 cobot could load cartons into cases, and IRB 460 and IRB 660 palletizers stack the cases at the end of the line.

An ABB FlexPicker cell set up with PickMaster Lite, which links the robot to a camera. Photo: ABB

What comes next for pharma packing

Pharma batch sizes are shrinking. More drugs are made for small patient groups, and contract packagers switch between products several times a week. That favours robots, because a robot changes format by loading a new program and swapping a gripper, while a mechanical feeder may need new change parts. Engineers can test a new pack pattern in RobotStudio before a changeover and check the cycle time against the blister machine's output. A cobot such as GoFa may also suit the cartoner infeed, where operators need to reach in during a changeover and a fenced cell gets in the way.

An ABB IRB 1200 Hygienic robot picking bananas, a food handling demo. Photo: ABB

At the patient end, pharmacies already use machines to fill weekly blister cards and multi dose pouches for patients who take many medicines, and carers and patients use those cards at home to check whether a dose was taken. Many pharmacists around the world still count tablets by hand for each prescription. Packing lines for these products have to switch between patients and products far more often than a factory blister line, which is where flexible robot picking may help. For the shelf side of the pharmacy, see our post on pharmacy dispensing robots.

A pharmacist counts tablets by hand with a spatula at a hospital outpatient pharmacy in Guyana, 2026. Photo: Maj. Stephani Schafer, U.S. Air Force via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The open problems are cleanliness, rules and cost. Robots on pharma lines must be easy to clean and must not shed particles, and every change to a validated line needs documentation under good manufacturing practice, which slows new automation. Small packagers find it hard to justify a robot cell for short runs. Skills are the last hurdle. Operators who run blister machines also need to understand vision, robot programs and serialisation software, so easier tools such as Wizard block programming on ABB robots help them adjust simple robot programs themselves.

Operators at a blister packing machine in the Ayursun Pharma plant. Photo: Aditiaudi / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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