Egg Handling Robot: From Candling to ABB Palletizers

Eggs are awkward to automate. They crack easily, vary in size and shape, and a large farm can ship more than half a million of them a day, usually in filler flats that hold 30 eggs each. An egg handling robot has to lift those flats, or single eggs, without breaking anything. This post follows the job from hand candling and the first grading machines to the robots that now stack egg trays onto pallets, including ABB machines in England and Singapore. It ends with the floor-egg robots being tested in poultry houses this year and what still holds robots back on egg farms.

Eggs moving along a grading line at a USDA egg grading facility in Athens, Georgia, 2022. Photo: Rene Carranza / USDA via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

How eggs were candled and graded by hand

Candling takes its name from the candles once used for it: a bright light behind the egg shows cracks and other defects through the shell. A 1924 photo in Artemas Ward's Encyclopedia of Food shows candlers at work in a room kept dark except for their lamps. In the United States, a 1960s report by the Department of Agriculture described how grading had been done for years. One worker at a manual grading bench moved full cases from the stacks, held each egg in front of a candling light, judged its size, packed it and cleared away the empty cases, often fetching packing material as well.

Workers candling eggs under hanging lamps, from Artemas Ward's Encyclopedia of Food, 1924. Photo: Capitol Photo Service via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Machines took the job over piece by piece. In the Netherlands, Job Mosterd disliked grading eggs on his father's farm and built a machine to do it, founding Moba in Barneveld in 1947. Moba sold the Moba 2000, the first machine that both graded and automatically packed eggs, in 1970, and its first computerised machine, the Moba 6000, in 1984. The USDA report describes the American steps of the same period: in-line scales that sorted each egg by weight on a conveyor, infeed conveyors six eggs wide, and vacuum and spring-type lifters that picked up many eggs at once.

Cartons of graded eggs on a rotary packing table, from a 1960s USDA report on mechanized egg grading. Photo: US Department of Agriculture via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Robots arrived at the end of the line, where the lifting is heaviest. Moba started a robotics programme in 2010. In August 2016 Sunrise Eggs in Sileby, England, installed an ABB IRB 6400 supplied by RM Group, with a head that picks four trays at once, 720 eggs per lift, and moves 70,000 eggs an hour onto pallets. Sunrise said sorting and palletising became 45% faster and that it had added jobs since the installation. In 2018 Poultry News reported that 40 of RM Group's refurbished IRB 6400 systems, a model often used in car plants, were working in UK egg packing plants.

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

Egg robots today, from the packing hall to the poultry house floor

The newest egg robot works on the barn floor. On 1 October 2026 WCTI reported on Howl, a robot that NC State University's AIR Lab is programming to find and collect eggs laid on poultry house floors. The university's Fall 2026 magazine describes Howl as a 4-foot-tall humanoid that students teach through virtual reality manipulation and other machine learning methods. The need comes from the move to cage-free housing, where more hens lay outside the nest. Ramesh Bahadur Bist, who leads the lab, says floor eggs can be 2% to 15% of production, or 2,000 to 15,000 eggs a day in a house of 100,000 birds.

Colony cages with egg collection belts in a UK barn that holds up to 40,000 hens, 2020. Photo: ShoebridgeCA / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Most ABB egg projects on record are about lifting. At Seng Choon Farm in Singapore, ABB installed a robotic palletising system in April 2017 that stacks boxes and baskets of eggs onto pallets. Before it, one worker lifted about 15 tonnes of eggs a day, a job rotated among seven people for safety. The farm reported a 30% rise in productivity, and its output passed 200 million eggs a year. In England, Automation UK built an ABB six-axis palletising cell for Hotham Eggs that picks 24 trays at a time, collects the plastic layer dividers with the same gripper, and handles more than 600 eggs a minute.

A white ABB robot with a multi-cup gripper on a packaging line. Photo: ABB

ABB's dedicated palletisers fit the same job. The IRB 460 is a four-axis robot with a 110 kg payload and a 2.4 m reach, rated at 2,190 cycles an hour with a 60 kg load, and ABB calls it the fastest palletiser in its class. Before palletising, eggs go into trays and cartons. Graders from Moba and Sanovo do much of that, and Sanovo's own palletiser, an articulated robot, handles 144,000 eggs an hour. A delta robot such as ABB's IRB 360 FlexPicker, which picks light items from moving conveyors at high speed, could add case packing of cartons, though ABB has not announced an egg line built that way.

ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker delta robots picking from a conveyor at high speed. Photo: ABB

Where egg handling robots go next

Machine vision is spreading at both ends of the chain. Moba introduced AI crack detection in 2021 that finds fractures too fine to see, and NC State is building systems that assess the health of individual birds alongside Howl. Floor-egg robots could take over a collection job that now costs staff time every day in cage-free houses. In packing plants the step after palletising is unloading pallets and feeding graders automatically, and Poultry News reported de-palletisers handling up to 600 cases, or 216,000 eggs, an hour. Robots that follow trays on moving belts use the same conveyor tracking methods as other food lines.

A worker checks eggs on a lit sorting line at a poultry farm in Pavlodar, Kazakhstan, 2021. Photo: primeminister.kz via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

At home the story is smaller. People who keep a few hens still candle eggs by hand, as Jerri Parker did for a USDA photographer on her farm in Cromwell, Oklahoma, in 2018, checking each egg for cracks. A household robot that gathers eggs would face Howl's problem in a smaller space: finding an egg in litter and lifting it without a crack. For now the egg robots that matter to home cooks are the ones in packing plants, because they decide which eggs reach the shop and how many arrive broken.

Farmer Jerri Parker candles an egg on her farm in Cromwell, Oklahoma, 2018. Photo: Preston Keres / USDA via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Cost comes first. In the 2018 Poultry News example, a reconditioned palletising cell cost around £45,000 and was expected to pay back in about three flocks, but only for sheds of 32,000 birds or more. Eggs also need soft grippers, slow contact speeds and constant crack checks, and hatching eggs need even gentler handling because each one holds a live embryo. Farms that buy robots will need staff who can keep them and the graders running as one line. Programs for palletising cells are usually built and checked first in RobotStudio, so a pallet pattern can be tried before the first tray is lifted.

A corridor inside a hatchery, lined with tall cabinets, 2014. Photo: Roee Shpernik / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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