Robotic Gluing and Sealing: ABB Robots From Caulk to EVs

A modern car body is held together and kept dry by more glue and sealant than most people would guess, and nearly all of it is laid by machines in beads a few millimeters wide. Robotic gluing and sealing covers that work: seam sealer that keeps water and noise out, structural adhesive that holds panels together, and urethane that fixes windshields and, more and more, closes up battery packs. This post traces the job from hand caulking to sealing robots in the body shop, looks at what ABB robots and dispensing packages do today, and asks where dispensing goes as electric vehicles use more adhesive and fewer welds.

ABB robots in the body shop at BAIC's electric car plant in Qingdao, China. Photo: ABB

From caulking irons to sealing robots in the body shop

Sealing joints by hand is very old work. Shipwrights drove oakum into the seams of wooden hulls with caulking irons and mallets and covered it with pitch, and sailing ships still needed this in the twentieth century, as photographs of the crew renewing the deck caulking on the barque Parma in 1933 show. On land, the caulking gun and cartridge made the job quicker. A trigger pushes a plunger, and the width of the bead depends on how the nozzle was cut and how steady the hand is. When a person does the job, that steadiness still decides the quality of the joint.

Crew members renewing the deck caulking on the barque Parma, 1933. Photo: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, via Wikimedia Commons (no known restrictions)

Car factories used the same hand methods for decades. Workers brushed or gunned seam sealer along the joints of welded bodies to keep out water and dust, and windshields sat in rubber gaskets fitted by hand. From the 1960s carmakers moved to glass glued into the body opening, first with butyl tape and then with urethane that cures with moisture from the air, and by the 1980s urethane bonding had become the standard. Each change asked for a longer, more even bead laid around a curved opening, which is hard to do the same way on every car by hand.

A US Air Force service member caulks along a baseboard with a hand caulking gun. Photo: U.S. Air Force via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Robots suit the job because bead quality depends on keeping flow and speed in step. A person slows down at a corner and the bead gets fat there, while a robot can change the flow as its speed changes. Adhesives also moved into structure. Lotus built the Elise of 1996 around an aluminium chassis bonded with epoxy, developed with Hydro Aluminium. In 2010 ABB opened a car body paint lab in Shanghai whose sealing zone used IRB 6640 robots on a Flextrack rail with ABB's dispense flow control to seal underbodies and inside seams.

A Lotus rolling chassis on show at the company's 60th anniversary celebration in 2008. Lotus has built bonded aluminium chassis since the Elise. Photo: Brian Snelson / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Dispensing cells for EV packs and body shops today

Electric vehicles have added a lot of dispensing. Battery housings need seals around their lids, cells are bonded into modules, and thermal paste or gap filler is laid between cells and cooling plates, all of it in beads or patterns that have to be complete and the right size. Car bodies use more structural adhesive too, which joins aluminium, steel and composites that are hard to weld together. That has side effects. A Yahoo Autos story on 11 September 2026 argued that bonded construction is one reason minor crashes now write off some electric vehicles.

A prototype car body after electrocoat, with grey and black acoustic panels applied. Photo: Cjp24 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Equipment makers are building larger cells for this work. In September 2026 PVA launched DeltaFlex, a large format dispensing and coating platform with a ruggedized gantry, a dual driven Y axis and standard workspaces of 800 and 1200 mm, aimed at EV battery production, aerospace and electronics, and showed it at The Battery Show North America. Assembly Magazine listed it among new adhesive and dispensing products on 30 September. At the small end, benchtop dispensing robots with a syringe and an XYZ table handle glue dots and potting on circuit boards.

A benchtop fluid and adhesive dispensing robot at DEF-TECH Bharat 2026 in Bangalore. Photo: Gpkp / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB covers the robot side with its Integrated Dispensing Function Package, which puts the dosing control inside the robot controller so the flow follows the robot's path speed. ABB quotes dispensing of up to 96 ml/s at robot speeds up to 1000 mm/s, control of up to four dosers for continuous or two component work, and an optional vision system for checking position and bead quality. Bead settings live in the robot program, written in RAPID. At BAIC's EV plant in Qingdao, ABB robots handle spot welding, arc welding, dispensing and body handling in the body shop.

ABB robots handling a body panel at BAIC's plant in Qingdao. Photo: ABB

Where robotic gluing and sealing goes next

Factories will keep moving toward adhesives as cars mix more materials and battery packs get larger and more structural. The next steps are mostly about checking. Cameras that follow the nozzle and measure every bead, and sensors that compare dispensed volume with the plan, let a cell reject a part while the glue is still wet. Repair and recycling are the other open question. A pack glued shut is hard to open, which is why adhesive makers are developing debond on demand materials that release when the part has to come apart.

The aluminium space frame of an early Tesla electric car in a showroom at Tesla's headquarters, 2007. Photo: Steve Jurvetson / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

The hard parts of dispensing are often chemical, and the robot program is the smaller task. Viscosity changes with temperature, so dosers and hoses are heated and held to about one degree. Two component adhesives start curing in the mixer, nozzles clog, and cure times set the pace of the line. People who run these cells need to understand both the material data sheet and the robot path. A lot of the path work can be done offline, and ABB's GoFa cobot with its Ultra Accuracy option, which ABB names for gluing and sealing in electronics, can be programmed in RobotStudio with a close match to the real cell.

A GoFa cobot with ABB's Ultra Accuracy option, here fitted with a measuring probe. Photo: ABB

At home, sealing still means a person with a caulking gun along a bathtub or window frame, and no household robot does that job today. The closest step is in small workshops, where a cobot that can be guided by hand and set up from a tablet could lay glue on short runs of parts that would never justify a full dispensing cell. This is only a possibility for cobots like GoFa, and ABB has announced no such product.

Silicone caulk pushed out of a cartridge by a caulking gun. Photo: Achim Hering / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

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