Drywall Finishing Robot: From Plaster to ABB

Hanging drywall is fast. Finishing it is the slow part: taping every seam, troweling on several coats of joint compound, waiting for each coat to dry and sanding the wall smooth enough to paint. A drywall finishing robot tries to take over the spraying and sanding while a tradesperson supervises. This post goes from lath and plaster walls to the Sackett board of the 1890s, follows hand taping into the era of Canvas and Okibo robots on job sites, and looks at the ABB robots that already build wall panels in factories, where more of the finishing may move next.

Workers tape and mud gypsum board seams in the new LIRR passenger concourse in New York, 2019. Photo: MTA Capital Construction Mega Projects / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

How plasterers and tapers made walls smooth

Before drywall, interior walls were plastered by hand. Workers nailed narrow strips of wood lath across the studs, leaving small gaps between them, and plasterers pushed lime or gypsum plaster into those gaps with a board so it locked behind the strips. More coats followed, each one troweled flatter than the last. It was skilled, wet work, and each coat had to dry before the next went on. In the US, Canada and Britain, lath and plaster fell out of favor between the 1930s and the 1950s, because drywall went up faster and needed less specialized training.

Three plasterers in work clothes pose for a tintype portrait in the 1870s. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Drywall started as Sackett Board. Augustine Sackett and Fred L. Kane, two Rensselaer graduates working for the New York Coal Tar Chemical Company, developed it around 1890, and Sackett patented it in 1894. It was plaster layered between four plies of wool felt paper, in sheets 36 inches square and a quarter inch thick, with open edges. United States Gypsum bought the Sackett Plaster Board Company in 1910 and introduced Sheetrock by 1917. Between 1910 and 1930 the board gained wrapped edges and paper faces, and the joint treatment materials changed along with it.

Exposed wood lath and plaster in the Tower of London, the kind of wall drywall replaced. Photo: McPhail / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Board solved the drying problem but created the seam problem. Every joint and screw head has to disappear under paper tape and joint compound, applied in coats and sanded between them. The trade grades the result on a scale that tops out at Level 5, a thin skim coat over the entire surface for walls lit at a low angle. The first automation was in the hand tools: mechanical tapers that lay tape and mud in one pass, flat boxes on poles that spread compound along a seam, and pole sanders for ceilings. The finisher still guided every stroke and breathed the dust.

Drywall offcuts with joint tape and taping knives, the basic tools of hand finishing. Photo: Timothyjosephwood / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Robots on the job site and in the panel plant

Canvas calls itself the first robotic drywall finishing company. Founded in 2017 in San Francisco as a spinoff of the research lab Otherlab, by veterans of Boston Dynamics, MIT and Stanford, it launched publicly in November 2020 with $19 million raised. Its machine maps the wall, sprays joint compound for a Level 4 or Level 5 finish, then switches tools and sands. Canvas signed with District Council 16 of the painters union, and union finishers run the machines. Its crews worked on San Francisco International Airport's Harvey Milk Terminal 1. Canvas now sits inside the lift maker JLG and sells the 1200CX and 2000CX machines.

A volunteer finishes drywall joints by hand in a home for disaster victims in Somersworth, New Hampshire, 2006. Photo: FEMA / Marty Bahamonde via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Okibo, an Israeli startup, takes a similar route for plaster and paint. Its robot scans the room in 3D, plans the work and moves an arm up and down a vertical track on a wheeled base. Even so, robots are rare on sites. On September 12, 2026, CNBC reported that the US is short about 1.2 million homes and needs roughly 740,000 new construction workers a year. Patrick Murphy of Coastal Construction told CNBC that people imagine humanoid robots hanging drywall and painting, and that "we're years out" from that. The clearest gains, said University of Michigan professor Vineet Kamat, come in repetitive, well structured tasks.

An airman of the Georgia Air National Guard sands drywall joint compound before painting, 2011. Photo: Georgia National Guard / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Factories are the obvious place for those tasks, and ABB robots already work in them. ABB is a technology partner of House of Design in Nampa, Idaho, whose ABB robots build trusses and wall panels from 3D models, with part of the software written in ABB's RAPID language. In 2025 Cosmic Buildings set up a mobile microfactory in Pacific Palisades, California, where ABB IRB 6710 robots build structural wall panels for homes lost in the wildfires, and the whole process is simulated first in RobotStudio. We covered that project in our post on home building microfactories.

An ABB robot building a timber wall panel inside the Cosmic Buildings mobile microfactory. Photo: ABB

Where wall finishing goes next

The next step is to move more finishing inside. A panel lying flat on a factory table is a much easier surface to work on than a wall in a half built room. The light is steady, the dust can be extracted and the robot knows exactly where every seam is, because it placed the board itself. No ABB customer finishes drywall this way yet. It is a likely direction, though, because panel plants already have the robots, the positioning and the 3D model of every wall. Japan points that way too: CNBC noted that Sekisui Heim lifted output at one factory from 55 to 65 homes a day with industrial robots.

Serendix's ABB IRB 6700 printing station parts for JR West in its factory. Photo: ABB

ABB has the hardware a finishing cell would need. ABB's IRB 5500 paint robots already spray car bodies with even, repeatable coats, a job close to spraying a skim coat, and our post on paint robots from car booths to walls traces that link. Force control lets an arm hold a sanding head against a surface at constant pressure, and RobotStudio lets engineers plan spray paths before a nozzle opens. For smaller shops, a GoFa CRB 15000 cobot could sand patches next to a worker. ABB does not sell any of this for drywall today, so treat it as a possibility.

The arm and applicator of an ABB IRB 5500 paint robot, built to spray even coats in a paint booth. Photo: ABB

Homes will still need on site finishing for years. Renovation work, corners, curved walls and patches around plumbing do not come from a factory, and a job site robot has to justify its cost against a skilled crew that can work in any room. Dust, noise and moving the machine between floors are open problems, as are the hours spent setting it up. The union model Canvas chose is one answer to the skills question: the finisher stays on the job and runs the machine, and the robot does the long, repetitive spraying and sanding.

A plasterer skims a wall with hawk and trowel in a house in Yate, England, 2009. Photo: Adrian Pingstone / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

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