Hygiene Products Manufacturing: Diapers and ABB Robots

A disposable diaper looks simple, but it is a stack of nonwoven sheets, elastic threads, absorbent pulp and gel, tapes and a printed backsheet, cut and glued at high speed. Diaper manufacturing is one branch of hygiene products manufacturing, next to adult incontinence pants, wipes and sanitary pads. This post follows the job from cloth nappies washed and folded by hand to today's converting lines. It then looks at the AI inspection and plant investments in the news this autumn, and at where ABB robots fit in packing, palletizing and material handling on these lines.

Pampers disposable nappies on supermarket shelves. Photo: Headlock0225 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From folded cloth to the first disposables

For most of history a nappy was a square of cloth, folded, pinned, soaked and washed at home, often every day. Folding a stack of them was part of the household routine, and in hospitals and maternity homes nurses and midwives did the same work at changing tables. The cloth had no waterproof layer, so wet clothes and bedding came with it. Anything new had to compete with a product that cost little money and a great deal of time.

A midwife changes a baby at a changing table, photographed by Arvid Florin between 1916 and 1925. Photo: Arvid Florin via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Marion Donovan, an American mother, made the first well known waterproof cover. She sewed the Boater from nylon parachute cloth, named it for its job of keeping babies afloat, and it went on sale at Saks Fifth Avenue in 1949. She received a patent in 1951 and sold her company that year for $1 million. Donovan also proposed a disposable paper diaper, but American paper companies turned the idea down. In 1961 Procter & Gamble researcher Victor Mills, who disliked changing his grandchild's cloth diapers, started the project that became Pampers.

Two women fold cloth diapers at a table, 1937. Photo: Harris & Ewing / Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The disposable diaper improved in steps, and each one needed new machines. A patent for adhesive tabs was filed in 1971, and in 1986 thin diapers with an absorbent gelling material cut the average diaper's weight by half. Today a diaper comes off a converting line. Rolls of nonwoven fabric and film unwind at one end, pulp is shredded into fluff and formed into pads, elastics are stretched and glued in, and a rotary knife cuts each diaper before it is folded and stacked. Machine builders such as Fameccanica, GDM and Zuiko specialise in these lines.

An opened disposable diaper showing its absorbent core, elastic leg cuffs and tapes. Photo: Ip19216811 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

AI inspection, new plants and robot packing

On 16 September 2026, Siemens and P&G said they would roll out their Visual Inspection Cockpit across P&G's manufacturing operations worldwide. It combines P&G's deep learning models with Siemens Industrial Edge computing and industrial PCs with Nvidia GPUs. According to the announcement, the products are delicate, textured materials that shift, stretch or wrinkle at high speed, which makes fixed vision rules hard to keep tuned. P&G reports scrap cut by 10 to 20 percent depending on the product, and new installations commissioned five to ten times faster than bespoke vision systems.

An ABB FlexPicker cell set up with PickMaster Lite. Photo: ABB

New plants are going up as well. In August 2026, India's Swara Baby Products announced a plant at Pithampur in Madhya Pradesh costing 558 crore rupees, partly funded by a planned share listing. It will add yearly capacity for 1,464 million baby diapers, 252 million adult diapers and 192 million sanitary napkins, in pant and tape styles. Whatever the size of the line, the output ends up the same way: diapers go into bags, bags into cases, and cases onto pallets for the warehouse.

A folded disposable diaper as it leaves the line before bagging. Photo: Ip19216811 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

That end of line work is where ABB robots usually appear in consumer goods plants, although ABB has not published a diaper reference. The IRB 460 and IRB 660 are four axis palletizers built to stack cases and bags quickly, and the IRB 360 FlexPicker delta robot picks light packs from a moving belt, guided by PickMaster software and a camera. For slower, mixed tasks next to operators, a GoFa CRB 15000 cobot can stack cases on a small pallet. Our post on robots in packaging lines covers the case packing side in more detail.

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

Where hygiene lines go next

In factories, the start of the line is the next candidate. A converting line uses up rolls of nonwoven, film and elastic quickly, and changing a heavy roll is still mostly a manual job with a hoist. ABB robots already do similar work elsewhere: at the German textile maker HUESKER, an IRB 6700 loads empty cores onto winding machines and takes off full twine reels. A similar arm, fed by Flexley Mover AMRs from the store, could change rolls on a diaper line, though that is a possible use and not an ABB diaper project. A cell like this would be checked first in RobotStudio.

An ABB IRB 6700 handles a reel on a winding machine at HUESKER in Germany. Photo: ABB

Materials are the other pressure. Used diapers go to landfill or incineration with household waste, and some brands now sell diapers made partly from plant based materials. Each change of material means retuning the line, so inspection that learns from examples, like P&G's, should make such changes easier. Robots that load new pack patterns and gripper settings by recipe from the controller also make small batches of new products cheaper to run. At home, families mostly notice the result as more choice on the shelf.

Reusable cloth diapers drying on a washing line. Photo: Wald1siedel / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The open problems will be familiar to anyone who has worked on a packaging line. Hygiene plants are dusty with fluff, so robots and grippers need protection and regular cleaning. Lines run fast, and a robot cell that cannot keep up becomes the bottleneck. Margins per pack are thin, and many plants in growing markets still pack by hand because labour costs less than a robot cell. Maintenance teams who know converting machines now also have to program and service robots, often with tools like ABB's Wizard easy programming.

A diaper cut open to show the fluff pulp core that makes hygiene plants dusty. Photo: Ip19216811 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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