Glove Manufacturing Robot: From Halsted to ABB

Most of the world's disposable gloves come from Malaysian factories, made on long dipping lines where hand-shaped formers ride a chain through tanks and ovens. Machines have handled the dipping for decades, while counting, stacking and boxing the finished gloves stayed largely manual. A glove manufacturing robot now takes over more of those end of line jobs. This post goes from the first surgical gloves at Johns Hopkins to Malaysia's continuous lines, then to the automation push behind Top Glove's October 2026 results, and asks where ABB robots could fit.

Top Glove founder Lim Wee Chai beside a glove line with gloves still on the formers; he started the company with one line in 1991. Photo: Wandawikey / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How rubber gloves were first dipped and stripped by hand

Surgical gloves started as a favour for one nurse. In the winter of 1889 or 1890, Caroline Hampton, chief nurse in the operating room at Johns Hopkins Hospital, developed a skin reaction to the mercuric chloride used to disinfect hands. William Halsted, the surgeon she later married, asked the Goodyear Rubber Company to make thin rubber gloves for her. By 1894 Halsted had brought sterilized gloves into use at Johns Hopkins.

William Halsted's first operation in the new surgical amphitheatre at Johns Hopkins, 1904. Photo: Wellcome Collection via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

The raw material came from plantations. Workers tapped rubber trees by hand and collected the latex in cups, as they still do on smallholdings in Malaysia. Turning latex into thin gloves used dipping: a hand-shaped mould goes into the liquid, comes out coated, and the film is dried and peeled off. In 1965 Ansell Rubber in Australia made the first modern disposable glove, basing its process on the way condoms were made. Nitrile rubber, the synthetic that later replaced latex in many medical gloves, had been developed in 1931 at BASF and Bayer.

Tapping a 23 year old rubber tree on a plantation in Malaysia, around 1910. Photo: C.J. Kleingrothe / KITLV via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The continuous dipping line made gloves a mass product. Ceramic formers shaped like hands hang from a chain and are dried in an oven, dipped for a few seconds in a coagulant such as calcium nitrate, then into the latex or nitrile bath. Patents describe the next stages as drying, leaching in water for several minutes, rolling a bead at the cuff, curing in an oven at around 260°F, stripping the glove off and washing the former in acid and caustic baths. Lim Wee Chai started Top Glove in Malaysia with a single production line in 1991, and Malaysia made about three quarters of the world's medical gloves by 2020.

A worker strips moulded rubber off core bars by hand at Paragon Rubber Co. in Holyoke, Massachusetts, in the 1930s. Photo: Lewis Hine / US National Archives via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Where robots are taking over glove lines today

Top Glove's executive chairman Lim Wee Chai said in June 2026 that the company needs about 1.7 to 1.8 employees per million gloves, against 3.5 to four before the pandemic. Its workforce fell from more than 15,000 to about 10,000 while output rose about 10 percent. Corporate director Lim Cheong Guan added that many of the easier automation projects are done and the next stage is aimed at lowering manpower needs across the whole operation. Malaysian makers still struggle to recruit enough foreign workers, and they compete with producers in China, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia.

Knitted work gloves on formers being dipped in a blue coating at Industria De Pascale, 2016. Photo: Rodrigo Dietrich / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

On 6 October 2026 Top Glove reported net profit of RM307.96 million for the year to 31 August, up from RM105.33 million, on revenue of RM4.23 billion. The company said ongoing process automation helped it cope with manpower constraints across the industry. At the results briefing, Lim said natural gas prices were expected to rise about 30 percent in October and that Top Glove would answer with heat energy efficiency and more automation. Packing is where robots have moved in fastest. The Malaysian packaging machine builder AFA Group used Omron SCARA robots to pack gloves, cobots to assemble boxes and a mobile robot to carry the cartons, and cut direct labour by 90 percent.

ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker robots packing small items into cartons. Photo: ABB

ABB has not announced a glove factory project that we could find, but its robots already do the same kinds of jobs in other plants. The IRB 360 FlexPicker picks and places light products at high speed, which matches stacking glove bundles or loading dispenser boxes, and PickMaster software lets it pick from a moving belt. At the end of a line, IRB 460 and IRB 660 palletizers stack finished cartons, as described in our post on case packing. Before a cell like this is built, its picking rates can be checked with conveyor tracking in RobotStudio.

An ABB IRB 660 palletizing robot stacking cases at the end of a line. Photo: ABB

What the next glove manufacturing robots will need to do

Stripping is harder to hand over. A cured glove is thin, elastic and slightly sticky, and it sits tight on a warm former moving past at line speed. Torn cuffs and doubled gloves still have to be spotted and sorted out. Better cameras and gentle grippers may let robots handle more of that inspection and rework. A dual-arm robot such as YuMi could, as a possibility, handle samples for quality testing, where gloves are filled with water to check for leaks.

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

For people at home, this mostly shows up in price and supply. Disposable nitrile gloves are in kitchens, garages and hair salons as well as hospitals, and the pandemic showed how fast shortages hit when factories cannot keep up. Plants that need fewer workers per million gloves can restart idle lines faster when demand jumps. For factories, robots that pack and palletize also mean fewer people lifting heavy cartons in hot buildings next to curing ovens.

Boxes of disposable nitrile gloves in a wall mounted dispenser, 2023. Photo: Kiran891 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Money is the first limit. Glove makers work on thin margins, and Lim said that after the pandemic margins fell by about 3 percent and at times went negative, so every robot has to pay for itself quickly. Robots near ovens and acid baths need guarding, and cobots or SafeMove zones help where people still share the floor. Plants also need technicians who can program and maintain the cells. Top Glove says it will keep investing in automation and artificial intelligence across production and process control.

A tapped rubber tree with fresh latex running down the cut, Pendang, Malaysia, 2025. Photo: Wiki Farazi / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

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