Carton Erecting Robot: From Hand Folding to ABB Arms

A carton erecting robot does a job that looks trivial until you watch it: it takes a flat sheet of corrugated board, opens it into a box, folds the bottom flaps and seals them, ready for product. Every packing line needs a steady supply of such boxes, and for a long time the answer was people or fixed machines. This post covers how cartons were made up by hand, how case erectors automated the job, what is new from the PACK EXPO International show in Chicago, and where ABB robots fit, including one installation that a trade magazine reported.

Erected cardboard cartons stacked in a warehouse room. Photo: thisisbossi / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

How boxes were made up by hand before case erectors

Before case erectors, boxes were made up by hand at benches. A Lewis Hine photograph from January 1909 shows women and children at work in a Tampa cigar box factory, and another shows men at long benches with finished boxes stacked beside them. Cigar boxes were wooden, a different product from corrugated cartons, but the working method was the same: a person handled each box, and output depended on how quickly and how long that person could keep going.

A woman works at a paper box machine in an early factory. Photo: George Eastman House via Wikimedia Commons (no known restrictions)

Machines for sealing boxes came first. Signode's Little David brand says its founders developed the first case sealing machine in 1962, which applied gummed tape to corrugated boxes. Erecting stayed manual for longer. An early US patent in this field notes that cases of this kind are normally erected by hand before they are fed to a filling machine. That left a gap in the line: a person standing at the start, opening each flat blank and folding its bottom flaps as fast as the packers needed them.

Women and children at work in a Tampa cigar box factory, January 1909. Photo: Lewis Hine, NARA via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The case erector closed the gap. According to Wikipedia, it opens flat corrugated blanks, squares them and seals the bottom, at roughly 10 to over 30 cases a minute. A magazine holds the blanks, a vacuum picker feeds one at a time to the forming unit, and flap folders and a sealer finish the job with tape, hot melt glue or staples. Its weakness is that each machine suits a narrow range of case sizes, so a plant with many box sizes needs adjustments or several machines. A patent filed in 1983 lists problems with the vacuum cups, glue systems and machine length.

Men at workbenches in the Tampa cigar box factory, 1909. Photo: Lewis Hine, Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

What carton erecting robots and new machines do today

The recent news is PACK EXPO International 2026 in Chicago, which runs from 18 to 21 October. Rychiger announced a 3-in-1 NCP-25 case packer that combines case erecting, robotic product loading and case sealing in one machine, with vacuum free case erection and tool free changeovers, according to Food Engineering on 18 September. A supplier release also says KUKA's partner Compendium plans to show robotic case erecting with two compact KR AGILUS robots. These are the suppliers' own claims.

A case erector with its carton magazine, vacuum picker, forming unit and bottom sealer labelled. Photo: Killgore1138 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB robots have already been used for this job. Packaging World reported on Radwell International, which installed a ROBOX robotic case erector from XPAK USA built around two ABB IRB 1600 six-axis robots. One robot picks flat boxes from one of six magazines. The other squares each case with a custom tool and passes it through a static folding table that folds and tapes the bottom flaps. Finished cases go down chutes sorted by size, and a photoeye and PLC tell the robot to make another case of that size when a chute empties.

A vision guided ABB IRB 1600 in a moulding cell in Sweden, the robot model used in the XPAK ROBOX. Photo: ABB

The point of the robot version is changeover. The ROBOX handles up to eight box sizes in one cell, and a typical footprint is about 8 by 8 feet, according to the same coverage. A fixed erector needs adjustments to change size, while an arm only needs a different magazine and program. ABB's other robots could contribute around the erector. An IRB 360 FlexPicker can load products into open cartons, and our post on packaging lines and case packing covers that, but no source shows ABB robots in the new Chicago machines.

ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker robots working over a line of open cartons. Photo: ABB

Where carton erecting robots go next

Cobots are the next step for small plants. A 2019 Packaging Digest article describes an XPAK cell with a single collaborative robot that serves up to 10 magazines, and Active8 Robots describes a cobot box erecting cell that it says can erect up to 3000 boxes a day, though that page dates from 2023. A GoFa CRB 15000 would be a natural ABB candidate for such a cell, because it can be taught by hand guiding and is built to work beside people, which small plants without much fencing space would value. This is a possibility, not an ABB product.

An ABB IRB 4400 cell packing moulded parts into plastic cases on a pallet. Photo: ABB

The open problems are cost, speed and board quality. A dedicated erector runs at 10 to over 30 cases a minute, and the sources here give no speed for the robot cells, so they look best for mixed sizes and short runs. Fixed machines keep the advantage on one size at high volume, which is why many plants will run both side by side for years. Warped or damp board and misfed blanks stop any erector, robotic or not. Programs for such cells, including the magazine pick and the fold sequence, are usually built and tested first in RobotStudio before the cell goes on the floor.

An ABB IRB 660 palletizer stacking boxed goods on a pallet. Photo: ABB

Homes see the change only through the boxes that arrive on their doorstep, since online orders travel in erected and sealed cartons like these. For factories the gain is switching box sizes without a long stop, and the skills needed shift toward cell setup, vision and maintenance. Safety guarding matters wherever an arm moves close to the packers, so a cell needs a risk assessment as well as a payback calculation.

Cartons stacked on pallets in a UNICEF warehouse. Photo: heb / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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