Corrugated Box Manufacturing and ABB Robots

Corrugated box manufacturing turns rolls of paper into the brown boxes that most online orders arrive in. A plant glues a fluted sheet between flat liners on a corrugator, then prints, cuts, folds and glues the board into boxes that leave the plant flat, in bundles, on pallets. This post looks at how the corrugated box was invented in the 19th century, how corrugators and flexo folder-gluers took over the work, what ABB's new AI vision tools and recent plant news mean for box makers, and where robots go next in the corrugated plant.

Stacks of corrugated board moving down a conveyor in a box plant, 2025. Photo: Streetsoda / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

From pleated hat paper to Robert Gair's folding box

Corrugated paper began as a hat lining. It was patented in England in 1856 as a pleated paper used inside tall hats, long before anyone made shipping boxes from it. On 20 December 1871 Albert Jones of New York City patented single-faced corrugated board, a fluted sheet glued to one flat liner, and used it to wrap bottles and glass lantern chimneys. In 1874 G. Smyth built the first machine for making corrugated board in large quantities, and the same year Oliver Long put a liner on both sides, which gave the board its modern form.

Torn corrugated board showing the fluted sheet between two flat liners. Photo: Richard Wheeler / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The box itself came out of a printing accident in Brooklyn. Robert Gair, a printer and paper bag maker born in Edinburgh in 1839 who had emigrated to the United States at 14, was printing seed bags in 1879 when a metal ruler meant to crease them shifted and cut them instead. Gair saw that cutting and creasing paperboard in one pass could produce flat, pre-cut boxes in bulk for customers to fold themselves. His folding carton used solid paperboard, and box plants still cut and crease corrugated blanks in a single pass today.

Robert Gair, inventor of the pre-cut folding carton, in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 1914. Photo: Brooklyn Daily Eagle via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

On the corrugator, making board became a continuous process. At the single-facer the fluting paper is heated, moistened and formed into flutes on geared rollers, then joined to a liner with starch based glue. At the double-backer a second liner goes on the other side to make single wall board. The sheets then move to converting machines that print, cut, score, fold and glue them. Finished boxes are stacked and sent to a banding machine, and much of that handling at the two ends of the line used to be done by people.

Women at work in the Kotelokulma corrugated and cardboard packaging factory in Helsinki. Photo: Pekka Kyytinen / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Box plants, AI vision and the 2026 news

Box makers are shifting capacity this autumn. On 23 September 2026 Paper Industry News reported that Pratt Industries plans to invest $97.6 million in a new corrugated packaging plant in Iowa, and on 2 October 2026 Packaging Dive reported that Packaging Corporation of America will close a full-line plant in Ohio. On 13 October ABB Robotics added AI Robot Trainer to its OmniCore EyeMotion vision software and showed both at the China International Industry Fair in Shanghai. ABB says the pair can cut commissioning time by up to 90% for vision guided picking, sorting and inspection.

An ABB IRB 660 palletizing robot stacking boxed products at the end of a line. Photo: ABB

Most corrugated board is printed flexographically, a coarse process that suits the thick, spongy board. In a converting plant, finished boxes come off a flexo folder-gluer in stacks and go to a banding machine before they are palletised, while sheets from the corrugator arrive in tall stacks that have to be fed into the converting lines. Both ends of the line mean heavy, awkward loads and repetitive motion, which is usually the first work handed to robots and automatic stackers. The paper itself starts on large rolls, a step covered in our post on paper roll handling.

Workers and a cutting machine among stacks of board at the Kotelokulma packaging factory in Helsinki. Photo: Pekka Kyytinen / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

We found no published ABB project inside a corrugated box plant, so what follows is how its robots could fit. ABB's IRB 460 and IRB 660 palletizers are built to stack bundles and layers at high speed, and the larger IRB 6700 can lift heavy stacks of board. EyeMotion with AI Robot Trainer could let one robot recognise many box sizes and printed designs as orders change, without someone coding each one by hand. Palletising cells like these are usually laid out and tested in RobotStudio before they are built.

An ABB four-axis palletizing robot with a layer gripper in a packaging line cell. Photo: ABB

Where corrugated box plants go from here

Shipping single orders to homes calls for boxes in many sizes, often in shorter runs. Robots that learn a new box size from a vision model suit that work better than ones tied to a fixed program, and so do flexible end of line cells that can switch between pallet patterns. ABB's vision tools, already used on case packing lines, point that way, though box makers will judge them on uptime more than on trade fair demos.

Cardboard boxes in different sizes for sale at the post office in Suvarnabhumi Airport, Thailand, 2009. Photo: Mattes / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

For people at home, the result is the box on the doorstep. A box sized to its contents uses less board and less filler, and old corrugated containers are a good source of recycled fibre for the next batch of board. Cells that switch sizes quickly make it cheaper for a plant to offer many box sizes instead of a few standard ones. At the other end of the trip, the same boxes are cut open again in warehouses and shops, often by hand, before the board goes back for recycling.

A box baler that presses used cardboard for recycling in a Walmart back room, 2009. Photo: Walmart / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Cost comes first. A robot cell in a box plant has to pay back quickly, and the closures and new builds of 2026 show how fast capacity can move. Corrugated bundles can be soft, warped or damp, which makes gripping less predictable than with rigid cartons, and a gripper that works for one board grade may crush another. Fast palletizers need fencing or monitored zones such as ABB SafeMove. Plants also need maintenance staff who can keep robots, vision models and converting machines running together on night shifts.

ABB palletizing robots on the UHT milk lines at Piracanjuba's plant in Goiás, Brazil. Photo: ABB (ABB Robotics magazine 1/14)

Innovation

AI solutions for effortless ABB robot control.

Automation

Robotics

ceojohntran@chatwithrobot.net

+84905311611

© 2025. All rights reserved.

qtran1215@gmail.com