Gift Wrapping Robot: ABB YuMi and the Holiday Rush

A gift wrapping robot sounds like a novelty, but wrapping is one of the hardest packing jobs to automate. Paper creases and tears, every box is a different size, and the customer expects a neat bow at the end. This post looks at how presents were wrapped by hand at store counters, how online retail first automated the plain shipping box, and how an ABB YuMi toured Swedish electronics stores in 2015 wrapping customers' gifts. Then it turns to this year's holiday rush, the box-on-demand machines spreading through warehouses, and where ABB's picking robots fit.

Presents wrapped in blue and gold paper with ribbon at a jewellery shop. Photo: W.carter / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From shop counters to the first wrapping robot

Decorated gift wrap is younger than most people think. In 1917 Rollie and Joyce Hall, the brothers behind Hallmark, ran out of the plain white, red and green tissue their Kansas City stationery shop sold at Christmas. They put out decorative envelope liners from France instead, and the Hall brothers went on to help make patterned gift wrap popular. Ribbons were added to gift wrap products in the 1930s. For most of the century, the wrapping itself was done by hand, at home or at store counters where staff folded paper around boxes for customers.

Christmas shoppers carrying wrapped parcels in New York, around 1910. Photo: Bain News Service / Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

When automation finally reached this kind of packing, it came from online retail and it skipped the paper. In May 2019 Reuters reported that Amazon was adding CartonWrap machines from the Italian company CMC to some warehouses. They scanned goods on a conveyor and built a box around each order, at 600 to 700 boxes an hour, four to five times the rate of a human packer. Each machine cost about $1 million and still needed people to load orders, clear jams and refill glue and cardboard. The boxes were plain brown cardboard, and any ribbon or patterned paper was still added by people.

Conveyors, cartons and pallets inside an Amazon fulfillment center during a 2025 visit. Photo: U.S. Army 405th AFSB, Cameron Porter / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The first well-documented gift wrapping robot came out of a store promotion. In late 2015, for a Christmas campaign, a single ABB YuMi toured 18 MediaMarkt stores in Sweden. Cognibotics and researchers from Lund University had about a month to program it in ABB's RAPID language. Customers put their purchase in a standard box, staff laid a sheet of paper in a fixture, and YuMi folded and taped it, stamped the packet and added a bow the customer chose. It worked without cameras or force sensors, using cardboard spatulas for some folds and its seventh arm joint to hold the box while the other arm taped.

An ABB YuMi, the dual-arm robot that wrapped gifts in Swedish stores in 2015, assembling small parts in a lab. Photo: ABB

The holiday peak and the box on demand

The pressure on packing comes back every autumn. Amazon's Prime Big Deal Days run on October 6 and 7, 2026, a 48-hour sale that Amazon presents as the start of the holiday shopping season, and the parcels from it land in the same weeks that warehouses start their peak. At shopping malls, the gift wrap stall is still a seasonal job for people with tape and scissors. In warehouses, the work has split in two: making the shipping box, which machines now do well, and adding a gift finish, which is still mostly done by hand.

A holiday gift wrap stand in The Oaks Mall, staffed by people with paper and tape. Photo: Michael Rivera / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Right-sized boxes are where automation is moving fastest. On 22 September 2026 Materials Handling World described how warehouses are buying machines that make each box to fit the order, citing UK figures of 4.2 billion parcels in 2024. Packsize, one of the suppliers, says its systems cut empty space in parcels by an average of 40 percent, use about 30 percent less corrugated board and about 80 percent less void fill, and that its fastest lines make and seal up to 1,300 packages an hour. These are the company's own figures, not independent measurements.

A spiral conveyor carrying goods between floors in an Amazon fulfillment center, 2025. Photo: U.S. Army 405th AFSB, Cameron Porter / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

ABB's part in this is getting items into those boxes. Its Robotic Item Picker, launched in April 2023, uses AI vision and suction grippers to pick unknown items from mixed bins at up to 1,400 items an hour, and ABB quotes a picking efficiency above 99.5 percent. In 2025 ABB added a Fashion Inductor and a Parcel Inductor, which pick poly-bagged clothes and parcels onto sorters. For fast pick and place into cartons, the IRB 360 FlexPicker is ABB's usual choice, as our post on robots in packaging lines explains. ABB has not announced a gift wrapping cell.

ABB's Robotic Item Picker, a small ABB arm with a suction gripper above two picking bins. Photo: ABB

What a gift wrapping robot still has to learn

In factories and fulfillment centers, the likely next step is gift-ready packaging. A picker or a FlexPicker could place items into a printed gift box, insert a card and close a sleeve, and a dual-arm YuMi or a GoFa cobot could handle the slower, fussier steps at a packing bench next to people. That is a possibility built from ABB's existing robots, not a product. Cells like this are usually laid out and tested in RobotStudio before anyone buys hardware, because the cycle time decides whether a cell pays off.

A suction gripper reaching into a bin of mixed items in ABB's Robotic Item Picker. Photo: ABB

Paper is the hard part. It bends, wrinkles and tears, and a fold that works on one box size fails on the next. Researchers in Masayuki Inaba's lab at the University of Tokyo presented a dual-arm humanoid at Humanoids 2024 that wraps objects of different shapes in paper and tape, using force control to keep the paper tight and 3D point clouds to check each fold. The Swedish YuMi needed standard boxes, a paper fixture and a person loading each gift. Getting a robot to wrap fast enough, cheaply enough and for presents of any shape is still an open problem.

An ABB robot with a large suction cup, from ABB's 2025 launch of new Item Picking modules for parcels and fashion. Photo: ABB

At home, a robot that wraps your presents is a long way off. A general home robot would need to handle scissors, tape and odd shapes, and it would have to do it safely around children. The more likely change is upstream: more gifts arriving already boxed and finished by machines in a warehouse, and more people choosing reusable cloth wraps like the Japanese furoshiki. Until then, most presents will be wrapped at kitchen tables and mall stalls, as they were a century ago.

A volunteer wrapping gifts at a fundraising gift wrap table. Photo: Visitor7 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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