Carpet Making Robot: Hand Knots, Tufting Guns and ABB

A hand-knotted rug is tied one knot at a time, while a tufting plant in Georgia turns out wall-to-wall carpet by the roll. A carpet making robot sits between those two worlds. It is an arm that carries a tufting gun across a frame and follows a digital design, so a one-off rug no longer needs a skilled hand on the gun. This post follows carpet making from the oldest surviving pile carpet through power looms and the tufting boom in Dalton, Georgia, to the robotic tufting machines sold today, and looks at where ABB robots could fit. ABB has no carpet tufting product, so that part is a possibility.

Hand-woven wool rugs from Sındırgı in Balıkesir province, Türkiye, made on hand looms with root-dyed yarn. Photo: Guney84 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From knotted pile to the tufting boom in Dalton

Knotted carpets are very old. The earliest known pile carpet was found in the Pazyryk burial mounds in the Altai Mountains of Siberia, tombs dated to the 4th to 3rd centuries BCE, where water seeped in and froze and kept the carpet in ice. It was excavated in 1949 and now hangs in the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. The method has barely changed since. A weaver ties short lengths of yarn around the warp threads of a loom, row after row, and each knot is one dot of colour in the pattern. Weavers in Bhadohi in India and in villages in western Turkey still work this way.

The Pazyryk carpet, the oldest known pile carpet, in the Hermitage Museum. Photo: Ninara / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Machines arrived in the 19th century. In 1839 the American inventor Erastus Bigelow agreed to build a power loom for two-ply ingrain carpets, which until then had been woven only on handlooms making about eight yards a day. His first loom made ten or twelve yards a day, and later improvements brought it to twenty-five. He went on to build a power loom for Brussels and velvet carpets, which drew attention at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851. The Bigelow Carpet Company turned Clinton, Massachusetts, into a mill town, and its brick mill buildings still stand there.

The Bigelow Carpet Mills in Clinton, Massachusetts. Photo: Marc N. Belanger / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Tufting changed the business again. Catherine Evans Whitener revived hand tufting in north Georgia in the 1890s and was selling bedspreads for $2.50 by 1900. By the 1920s thousands of people in Georgia, the Carolinas and Tennessee made tufted bedspreads at home. In the 1930s mechanics adapted surplus Singer sewing machines for the work, and the push for a machine wide enough for bedspreads led Dalton's machine builders to a carpet tufting machine. Tufting needles punch yarn through a backing cloth instead of weaving it in, which is far faster. Today more than 90 percent of the carpet made in the US is tufted, and Dalton is home to many of the country's floor-covering makers.

Four tufting carpet lines at a plant in Soest, the Netherlands, March 1977. Photo: BM Veen / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Hand-tufting guns and robotic tufting today

For rugs made one at a time, tufting moved into the hand. A hand-tufting gun shoots yarn into a backing cloth stretched on a frame while the operator follows a design drawn on the cloth. The Hong Kong company Tai Ping used motorised hand-tufting guns in the late 1950s, and the same tool is now a hobby: in September 2026 Axios wrote about a rug tufting studio in Charlotte's NoDa district that sells sessions as a date night. Handmade carpet is still a large trade. The 50th India Carpet Expo, organised by India's Carpet Export Promotion Council and billed as Asia's largest carpet fair, ran from 4 to 7 October 2026 in Bhadohi, Uttar Pradesh.

An artisan tufts a Tai Ping carpet with a motorised hand-tufting gun in the late 1950s. Photo: RayTaiPing / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Robots now hold the gun. The German company EFAB sells the eTuft, a robotic tufting machine for custom carpets and artificial grass. Its Robotuft software converts pixel designs into vector paths, calculates the robot's moves and supports several pile heights as well as mixed cut and loop designs, and EFAB says this cuts production time and cost. At the University of Applied Arts Vienna, researchers rebuilt a hand-tufting gun and fixed it to a six-axis robot to tuft 3D surfaces onto 3D objects. Hobbyists have strapped tufting guns to robot arms for CNC textile art too. In each case a design file goes straight to the frame, and the robot repeats it without getting tired.

A TD-01 hand-tufting gun of the kind hobbyists and robot builders use. Photo: KnowledgeBySean / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

As far as public sources show, ABB has no tufting product and none of these machines uses its arms. Its robots already do jobs with a similar shape, though. In 2022 ABB's PixelPaint system used IRB 5500 paint robots to copy artwork onto a car, following paths generated from an image. A mid-size arm such as the IRB 4600 could carry a tufting head across a frame in the same way, and the path could be generated and checked in RobotStudio from the design file before the first stitch. At the end of the line, IRB 660 palletizers stack heavy goods in many plants, and rolled or boxed rugs are that kind of load.

An engineer programs a robot cell in RobotStudio next to an ABB industrial robot. Photo: ABB

Where carpet making robots go next

In carpet plants, robots will probably spread around the tufting machines first. Broadloom tufting is already a fast machine process, so most of the remaining manual work is handling: loading yarn, moving heavy rolls, cutting, edging and packing. Palletizers, mobile robots and vision systems already do that kind of work in other industries. Our post on mobile yarn handling in textile mills shows ABB robots on a related job. For custom rugs, robotic tufting could let a showroom or website take a buyer's own design and have it tufted to size.

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

For homes, that would mean more choice. A tufted rug in a family's own design, sized to one room, has meant paying a skilled tufter for hours of work, and a robot that tufts from a file could bring the price closer to a standard rug. Hand-knotted carpets are a different product, since buyers pay for the hand work itself, and I would not expect robots to replace the knotters of Bhadohi any time soon. The two can sit side by side, with machines making custom tufted pieces and people making the knotted heirlooms.

An ABB IRB 660 palletizer stacking boxes at the end of a line. Photo: ABB

Plenty of practical problems remain. A tufting gun vibrates and needs a tightly stretched cloth, so a robot cell needs a rigid frame and good tension control. Yarn breaks, and someone has to rethread the gun. Backing, gluing and shearing still follow the tufting, and these messy steps are harder to automate. Cost is the other question: a cell with a large arm, a frame and software has to pay for itself against skilled tufters in places where labour is cheap. Training changes too, because the skill moves from the hand on the gun to the design file and the robot program.

The former Templeton carpet factory on Glasgow Green, Scotland. Photo: Anthony O'Neil / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

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