Control Cabinet Wiring Robots and Where ABB Fits

Open the control cabinet of almost any machine and you find hundreds of wires, each one cut to length, stripped, fitted with a ferrule and fixed into a terminal. Control cabinet wiring is the slow part of building a cabinet: Rittal Automation Systems and Eplan put manual wiring at up to 50 percent of total production time in traditional cabinet building. This post starts with relay panels wired by hand and the PLCs and wire processing machines that followed, then looks at the wiring robots built by Kiesling and WAGO, the new Rittal and Eplan labs at Purdue, and where ABB robots could fit.

An open electronic control cabinet with rows of components and wiring inside. Photo: RICHI Manufacture / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How relay panels and early PLC cabinets were wired by hand

Before the programmable logic controller, factory control logic lived in hardware: relays, cam timers and drum sequencers wired together inside cabinets. Because the logic was hard-wired, changing a production process meant rewiring the panel and carefully updating the documentation, and troubleshooting was tedious. A 1967 photograph from Boundary Dam in Washington State shows a technician sitting among relay panels next to the wiring for manual synchronizing equipment. Rittal, founded in 1961 in Rittershausen, Germany, and named after the village, is now a German maker of electrical enclosures for industrial use.

Relay panel wiring and manual synchronizing equipment at Boundary Dam, Washington State, 1967. Photo: Seattle Municipal Archives / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

The PLC moved the logic into software. Dick Morley is credited with inventing the first one, the Modicon 084, for General Motors in 1968 to replace hard-wired relay systems, and a PLC can be changed by loading new code instead of rebuilding hardware. The wires stayed. Each one still had to be cut to length, stripped, given a crimped ferrule and fixed in place, mostly by hand, and WAGO says cabinet wiring is still heavily manual today. Machines took over the work around it first. Kiesling Maschinentechnik, a German firm founded in 1970, built machining centres for enclosures and automated assembly systems for terminal strips.

An Allen Bradley PLC installed in an electrical enclosure (BMA Automation). Photo: Elmschrat / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Robots reached the wiring itself through the same company. In 2013 Rittal merged with Kiesling, which brought it into the Friedhelm Loh Group, owner of the engineering software company Eplan. Kiesling's newest machine at the time was Averex, a robot-assisted wiring centre built so that mounting plates no longer had to be wired laboriously by hand. It prepared the wire ends, laid the wires in the cable ducts and connected them to components, using wiring data and component positions from Eplan Pro Panel's 3D model of the cabinet. A tool changer held six tools for different types of connection, and the machine handled wires from 0.75 to 2.5 mm².

Hand crimping tools for wire ferrules of different sizes. Machines and wiring robots now prepare wire ends automatically. Photo: Simon A. Eugster / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

Wire terminals and wiring robots in 2026

Rittal Automation Systems now automates the steps before a wire goes into the cabinet. Its Wire Terminal machines cut wires to length, strip, crimp and label them, and depending on the version they produce up to 36 different wires automatically. In April 2026 Rittal launched the smaller WT L for small and medium panel builders. It says the machine speeds up wire processing by up to 11 times and pays back in 2.5 years at 150 enclosures a year with 500 wires each. The Wire Handling System, shown in November 2025, blows finished wires through hoses to up to four workstations as far as 80 metres away, just in time and in sequence.

Komax Schleuniger wire processing machines on show at electronica India in Bangalore, 2025. Photo: Gpkp / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Robots that do the wiring itself are on sale as well. WAGO's Wiring Bot wires frames and mounting plates from one side. It uses a camera and a laser to correct its position, has a tool magazine with room for eight tools and takes plates up to 750 by 1800 mm on a transport cart. Together with WAGO's conductor preparation station it cuts manual labour by 60 percent, and WAGO says it works with components from any manufacturer and needs no 3D CAE engineering. Rittal is planning for such machines too: Thorsten Eberz of Rittal Automation Systems says the Wire Handling System can supply future wiring robots as well as people at workstations.

A wire ferrule crimped onto the end of a wire, the kind of wire end that wire terminals and wiring robots handle. Photo: Simon A. Eugster / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

We found no ABB robot wiring control cabinets yet, so ABB's part here is a possibility. ABB already supplies low-voltage equipment to panel builders, and in April 2026 it signed a technology partnership with Rittal that covers power distribution platforms such as RiLineX and Ri4Power. For the wiring itself, ABB designed YuMi for small parts assembly with people and robots side by side, and the single-arm YuMi weighs 9.5 kg, has seven axes and can be mounted on a ceiling, table or wall. ABB's Integrated Force Control lets a robot react to contact and search for the right position during assembly, which a wiring cell could use to seat a wire end in a terminal.

A dual-arm ABB YuMi assembling small parts at Hawa Sliding Solutions in Switzerland. Photo: ABB

Where cabinet wiring robots go next

Design data is starting to drive the whole job. Eplan Smart Production sends engineering data from the digital twin straight to the processing machines, and Eplan Smart Wiring guides a person through each wire on screen with 3D views, wire lengths and target points. A robot needs the same data, and Averex was already using it in 2013. An ABB cell for this would be planned in RobotStudio, ABB's simulation and offline programming software, which runs on a virtual controller that copies the real robot software. Wire harnesses for cars are a different problem, covered in our post on wire harness assembly.

An engineer programs a single-arm ABB YuMi at a work table. Photo: ABB

The first robot-wired boxes many people meet may be in their own homes. WAGO says its Wiring Bot works best in building installation and energy distribution, on cabinets built in series with a limited range of parts such as miniature circuit breakers, residual current devices and rail-mount terminal blocks. Those are the parts in a home distribution board like the one pictured below, which uses ABB breakers. In factories, Rittal's WT L figures show wire automation paying off at 150 enclosures a year, which brings it within reach of smaller panel shops. Larger builders can link wire terminals, wire handling and later robots into one line driven by Eplan data.

A distribution panel for a small house, fitted with ABB breakers. Breakers and residual current devices are the parts WAGO's Wiring Bot is built to wire. Photo: Retired electrician / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Variety is the first obstacle. WAGO says its robot suits orders with low variability and recommends a feasibility analysis first, so cabinets built one at a time to different designs are harder to automate. Payback depends on volume, which is why Rittal quotes its 2.5 years against a fixed annual output. Safety around the WAGO robot comes from a protective enclosure, safety-monitored doors and light curtains. And someone has to design, program and check these cells. On 15 September 2026 Purdue Polytechnic opened Rittal and Eplan labs in Dudley Hall under a five-year partnership with the two companies, to train engineers for that kind of work.

A teacher and students at an ABB Robotics Education Package cell with a GoFa cobot. Photo: ABB

Innovation

AI solutions for effortless ABB robot control.

Automation

Robotics

ceojohntran@chatwithrobot.net

+84905311611

© 2025. All rights reserved.

qtran1215@gmail.com