Fruit Peeling Robot: ABB Arms From Knife to Cell

A fruit peeling robot sounds like an easy job until you try to build one. Apples are round, pineapples have a tough skin, and every piece of fruit comes in a slightly different shape. People have dealt with that using knives and crank machines for more than two centuries. This post follows peeling from the paring knife to the processing plant, looks at what robots are doing in fruit and vegetable lines this autumn, and asks where ABB arms such as the IRB 360 FlexPicker, IRB 1200 Hygienic and GoFa could fit, and what stands in the way of a robot that peels at home.

A table-top crank apple peeler of the kind still sold today. Photo: Raimond Spekking / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How hand peeling turned into crank machines

For most of history, peeling meant a knife and patience. In the United States the first big step came in 1803, when Moses Coates, an inventor in Pennsylvania, patented a hand-cranked apple parer. It had a wooden frame with a metal blade and prongs that held the apple while the crank turned it. The idea caught on. Well over a hundred more apple parer patents followed in the next hundred years, mostly small changes to the same spinning design.

An antique hand-cranked apple parer made by George Bergner. Photo: George Bergner / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

By the late 1800s, small foundries sold parers as a regular product. One made by George Bergner dates from somewhere between 1872 and about 1900. Heavier cast-iron versions went to farms and hotels, and the Canada Science and Technology Museum keeps a commercial model with a gear train, built for people with a whole barrel of apples to get through before they spoiled. The machine did the spinning. A person still loaded each apple and cleared away the peel.

A commercial apple peeler with a gear train in a Canadian museum. Photo: David Carroll / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Canneries brought peeling up to industrial scale. A 1939 Federal Writers' Project photograph shows a woman inspecting peaches on a cannery line in California, with the fruit moving down a spiral chute. Machines handled the bulk of the work, and people stayed at the line to catch blemishes and misses. Most fruit plants still run that way: a machine does the repeatable part and human eyes fix what it gets wrong. Robots arrived later, first for packing and sorting, and only then for cutting and peeling.

A worker inspects peaches on a cannery line in California in 1939. Photo: Federal Writers' Project via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Peeling machines and robots on the line today

Peeling machines are now common where fruit and vegetables are prepared for sale. A supermarket in Germany has a HEPRO machine that peels pineapples while shoppers watch. In the Netherlands, Go-Products, a company that already sorted onions with cameras, added a Finis onion peeling line in June, and FreshPlaza reported on it on 14 October 2026. The line can handle about 1,000 kilograms an hour, though it is not fully used yet, and three or four people work in the facility. The owner calls peeling a side business. The onions go out in big bags, crates and 20 kilogram bags.

A HEPRO pineapple peeling machine in a supermarket. Photo: HEPRO / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Robots are moving into the same plants. On 8 October 2026 Robotics & Automation News reported that Stäubli robots with AI cameras inspect peach halves at a Greek processing plant run by Agrophoenix, at about 100,000 peaches an hour. Eight Stäubli SCARA robots pull out halves that hold pit fragments. Stäubli also promotes a robot cell that peels up to 1,000 avocados an hour. Those are Stäubli projects, and none of them involve ABB. ABB's own food range includes the IRB 1200 Hygienic, a washdown arm that ABB has shown picking bananas in a food handling demo, which is the kind of hardware a peeling cell could build on.

An ABB IRB 1200 Hygienic robot picking bananas in a food handling demo. Photo: ABB

Where would ABB robots fit? ABB has not announced a fruit peeling product, so this is a possibility and nothing more. The tasks around the peeler are the strong fit. An IRB 360 FlexPicker can lift peeled or cut pieces off a belt at high speed and place them into trays. A GoFa CRB 15000 can feed a peeling machine, load and unload crates, or hold a cutting head next to operators. Cells like this are usually built and tested virtually first in RobotStudio, and ABB's PickMaster software handles vision-guided picking. For a related food story, see how ABB robots work in fruit packhouses.

ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker delta robots picking items on a moving line. Photo: ABB

What a home peeling robot still needs to solve

The next step in factories is probably more flexible cells. A plant that peels onions today may want to peel pineapples next season, which calls for grippers that adapt and cameras that judge where the peel ends and the flesh begins. Ripeness changes from batch to batch. A robot that cuts too deep wastes fruit, and one that cuts too shallow leaves skin behind. Waste is the real cost in this work, so any ABB-based cell would be judged on how little flesh it throws away as well as on its speed.

An ABB GoFa cobot loading parts into a machine at a small factory. Photo: ABB

Safety and cleaning are the other factory problems. Peeling puts blades next to wet, slippery food, so cells need guarding, hygienic design and quick washdown. Collaborative arms like the GoFa and YuMi are built to work near people and stop on contact, which helps when staff step in to clear a jam, but a sharp tool on a cobot still needs a risk assessment. Skills matter too. Someone has to teach and maintain these cells, and small food companies often have no robot programmer on staff.

An ABB YuMi assembling small parts beside a lab worker. Photo: ABB

At home, the competition is a cheap tool. A countertop crank peeler costs little, works well on apples and takes seconds. A robot would have to beat that while also loading the fruit, coping with odd shapes, cleaning itself and staying safe around children. Most work on home kitchen robots targets cooking and tidying. The likeliest route for peeling is as one skill of a general kitchen robot, and that depends on price and safe design, so it is probably many years off. Plants will get peeling robots first.

The blade and spindle of a countertop apple peeler, the cheap tool a home robot must beat. Photo: Raimond Spekking / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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