Boat Building Robot: Moulds, 3D Printing and ABB

How the boat building robot grew from lofted wooden frames and fibreglass moulds to milled plugs and 3D printed hulls, and where ABB arms and RobotStudio fit.

INDUSTRIAL ROBOTICS

Chat With Robot

10/5/20265 min read

A boat building robot can mill a hull plug from foam, trim a fibreglass hull, sand a deck or print a whole hull bead by bead. Boat yards were slow to use robots because almost every hull is a little different and many are built a handful at a time. This post follows boat building from wooden frames lofted by hand and the first fibreglass hulls to the robots now at work in marine plants, using Trade Only Today's September report on robots, AI and 3D printing, and looks at where ABB arms such as the IRB 6700 and tools like RobotStudio fit, and what still holds the industry back.

Woman in a blue suit christening a dark grey 3D printed boat on a stand, with people holding a certificate

Senator Susan Collins christens 3Dirigo, the University of Maine's 3D printed boat, in October 2019. Photo: Office of U.S. Senator Susan Collins via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

How boatbuilders shaped hulls by hand and then in moulds

For centuries a hull began on the floor of a mould loft. Loftsmen drew the boat's lines full size from the designer's table of offsets, then cut wooden templates for each frame. In the yard, carpenters set up the frames on a keel, bent planks over them and fastened them by hand. Seattle's Blanchard Boat Company, founded by Norman J. Blanchard in 1905, built nearly 2,000 boats this way over its 64 years, commercial boats, motor cruisers and sailing yachts among them, including the sloop Neoga, framed up in its shed in 1929.

Sepia photo of a wooden boat hull with bare frames on stocks inside a large timber shed

The sloop Neoga in frame at the Blanchard Boat Company, Seattle, 1929. Photo: unknown author, MOHAI via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The skill lived in people's hands. Each boat in a Blanchard photo from 1924 is a stack of hand-sawn frames, steamed planks and caulked seams, and two sister boats were never quite identical. The change that ended this came from a new material. Ray Greene of Owens Corning is credited with making the first composite boat in 1937, although the plastic he used was too brittle for him to go further at the time.

Black and white photo of a cluttered boat shed with a wooden hull among beams and timber

The boat Malibu under construction at the Blanchard Boat Yard, Seattle, 1924. Photo: unknown author, MOHAI via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Fibreglass took over after the Second World War, as better resins arrived. By around 1960 even Harley-Davidson was selling a fibreglass runabout, the Tomahawk. The method turned a hull into a moulded part: workers laid glass mat into a female mould and wet it with resin by brush or roller, or sprayed resin and chopped glass together from a chopper gun, then rolled out the air by hand. One mould could be used for hull after hull. Making the plug and mould was still slow hand work, and so were the trimming, grinding and sanding that followed.

White and turquoise small fibreglass runabout boat hanging from a ceiling in a museum

A fibreglass Tomahawk boat built by Harley-Davidson around 1960, on display. Photo: Adam Moss / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Robots, AI and 3D printing in marine plants today

Machines took over the mould making first. Large CNC routers and robot arms now mill hull plugs and moulds straight from the CAD model, so a yard no longer needs a loft floor. The next step skips the mould entirely. In October 2019 the University of Maine unveiled the world's largest 3D printer, built by Ingersoll, and a boat printed on it, 3Dirigo, earning three Guinness World Records between them. In late August 2026 UMaine launched a new printed boat in Hampden with a different hull design.

Huge blue gantry 3D printer with University of Maine and Ingersoll labels spanning a factory floor

The large Ingersoll 3D printer at the University of Maine's Advanced Structures and Composites Center, unveiled in 2019. Photo: ChristelmPeters / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Trade Only Today's report of 30 September shows how far the big builders have gone. Brunswick says Mercury Marine runs several hundred industrial robots for casting, painting, machine tending and inspection, and that 3D printed sand moulds cut prototype lead times from 12 to 16 weeks to about three or four. Cohesive Robotics, founded in 2022, builds vision-guided cells for sanding and surface treatment of parts as large as a hull, with the worker finishing the last 10% by hand. Elsewhere, in St. Petersburg, Florida, Haddy prints drone boat hulls with eight large-format CEAD robot systems, seven of them on rails.

Orange ABB robot arm with a tool head over a long wooden beam in a work cell

An ABB robot works on a long wooden part clamped in a fixture, with dust hoses overhead. Photo: ABB

ABB fits this work through arms it already sells for other industries. No source shows an ABB robot building a boat hull, so this part is a possibility. An IRB 6700 has the reach and stiffness to mill foam plugs or trim large parts, and ABB has used it for big 3D prints such as the walls of the German Red Cross headquarters in Warendorf-Beckum. Paths for that kind of milling or printing are generated from CAD and checked for reach and collisions in RobotStudio before a tool touches the plug. ABB's GoFa cobot already sands curved wooden panels in its OmniVance finishing cell.

White ABB robot arm on a site printing curved grey concrete walls layer by layer

An ABB IRB 6700 printing the walls of the German Red Cross headquarters in Warendorf-Beckum. Photo: ABB

Where boat building automation goes next

The hardest part is the variety. A plant may build ten models in small batches, so a robot cell has to switch hulls quickly and cope with parts that are never exactly where the program expects. That is why vision and scanning matter so much: Cohesive's cells scan the as-built part, and Mercury Marine is pairing computer vision with its existing robots for inspection. Our post on carbon fibre composites covers similar robot work on composite parts outside the marine world.

Engineer at a laptop showing a 3D model, with a robot printing cell in the background

An engineer runs a robot 3D print planned in ABB RobotStudio. Photo: ABB

Printing whole hulls raises its own questions. Printed thermoplastic hulls still have to prove how they stand up to years of sun, salt water and knocks against the dock before buyers and insurers trust them. Builders also have to decide whether a printer makes the boat or only the mould, which is how Brunswick mostly uses 3D printing today, for prototypes and tooling. The fastest wins may come from printing moulds and fixtures that used to take weeks of hand work.

White cobot arm pressing an orbital sander onto a curved wooden panel in a pink lit cell

A GoFa cobot sands a curved wooden panel with a Mirka sander inside ABB's OmniVance finishing cell. Photo: ABB

Skills and money decide the pace. Brunswick says every robot project has to show a clear business case, and small yards cannot spend millions on a cell they will use for one model. Workers who used to grind and sand all day will need to run cells, program paths and check quality, and robots that take on dusty, tiring jobs may help yards keep them, a point the Cohesive founder made to Trade Only Today. Hand finishing, like the final touches at Seattle's Center for Wooden Boats, will stay part of the craft.

Young person reaching up to work on the varnished wooden frame of a boat hull

Putting final touches on a boat hull at the Center for Wooden Boats, Seattle, 2007. Photo: Joe Mabel / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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