Hydraulic Cylinder Manufacturing: ABB Robots and EyeMotion

Hydraulic cylinder manufacturing turns steel tube, rod and seals into the part that pushes an excavator boom or a press ram, and it has to hold pressure for years. This post follows the cylinder from Joseph Bramah's press of the 1790s to the robotic welding and honing cells of today. It looks at the October 2026 news from ABB, including OmniCore EyeMotion with AI Robot Trainer and the new IRB 1700 family, and it says where ABB has announced nothing about cylinders and the fit is only a possibility.

Large hydraulic cylinders stacked together, each with a mounting eye on the end. Photo: Rstom03 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

From Bramah's press to the modern cylinder

Joseph Bramah patented his hydraulic press in 1795, and most sources agree on that date. The idea was to push water through a small piston and use a larger one to multiply the force. The hard part was the seal between piston and cylinder, which leaked under pressure. Bramah first tried a coil of hemp and leather packed into the piston neck, which worked only partly. Henry Maudslay, who worked in Bramah's shop, is credited with the fix, though sources disagree on exactly what he invented.

Illustration of Joseph Bramah's hydrostatic press with section and details. Illustration: Wellcome Collection via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

The fix was a cup shaped leather seal, sometimes called Bramah leather, set in a circular cavity in the piston so that pressure pushes it against the cylinder wall. The harder the fluid pushes, the tighter it seals. One source says the press eventually displaced the steam hammer for forging, and a Bramah press survives at the Sheffield Industrial Museum. The same engineering problem, a tight bore and a seal that keeps working, is what cylinder makers still solve.

Illustration of Bramah hydraulic machinery, showing sections of the cylinders and fittings. Illustration: Wellcome Collection via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

A modern cylinder is built from a tube, a polished rod, a piston, a gland with seals, and end fittings such as a base and a mounting eye. In a typical design the end fittings are welded to the tube, and the inside of the tube is machined to a fine finish so the seals run smoothly. Excavators and cranes carry several of these cylinders on every boom. The photos on this page show a few. The bore finish, the tolerances and the welds decide how long a cylinder lasts.

A double acting hydraulic cylinder with a clevis mounting eye and two ports. Photo: Rstom03 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Robotic welding and honing today

Making a cylinder usually means cutting the tube, welding on the base and the eye, finishing the bore, and assembling the rod, piston and seals. The welds are pressure parts, so a poor seam can become a leak. That is why many shops use robot arc welding, where a rotating positioner turns the tube and the torch follows a seam that never changes. Honing the bore is a separate step, and tending those machines is another repeat job a robot can take over, since the operator mostly loads a tube, starts a cycle and checks the result.

An ABB arc welding robot with a positioner that turns heavy parts. Photo: Ana 2016 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB's news this month points in the same direction. On 13 October 2026 ABB announced the IRB 1700 and IRB 1700ID, with payloads from 6 kg to 12 kg across five variants. ABB lists arc welding, deburring, sanding and material handling among their jobs, and claims up to 20 percent shorter cycle times. Small cylinders and parts such as eyes and ports fit that size. For heavy cylinders, a larger arm such as the IRB 6700 would be the natural class to look at. That is my suggestion, not an ABB announcement.

An ABB IRB 1700ID with a welding torch and wire feeder at its public debut at CIIF in Shanghai, October 2026. Photo: ABB

ABB also expanded OmniCore EyeMotion with AI Robot Trainer at CIIF in Shanghai in mid-October 2026. ABB says the pair can train and deploy vision applications without AI specialists, work with any brand of camera, and cut commissioning time by up to 90 percent. Those are ABB's own figures. In a cylinder shop, vision could find tubes and rods that arrive in mixed bins before the arm picks them up. Teams usually design such a cell first in RobotStudio, where the reach of the arm, the position of the positioner and the path of the torch can be checked before anything is built.

A presenter points at ABB's AI Robot Trainer screen during the OmniCore EyeMotion demonstration, October 2026. Photo: ABB

Electric actuators, small batches and the next cells

Some of the news pulls the other way. On 12 October 2026 Electromate, a motion control distributor, highlighted Tolomatic's RSX128 electric actuator, rated up to 100,000 lbf, and pitched it to machine builders weighing alternatives to hydraulic cylinders. The release itself says force and continuous duty must be checked for each application. Electric actuators may take some jobs. For a cylinder maker the question is how much demand moves, since a smaller order book for big cylinders would change what its welding cells need. I found no figures on that shift.

The cylinder end of a hydraulic press brake, the kind of heavy duty cylinder that robots weld and machine shops hone. Photo: Márton Kiss-Albert / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

For factories, the open problems are variety and skills. A cylinder maker may build many bore sizes and stroke lengths in small batches, so cells must change over fast. Welding fume, heavy parts and guarding add cost, and every new fixture for a new tube size adds more, and not every shop has staff who can program arcs and vision. That is why easier tools such as no-code robot control matter, and the post on excavator manufacturing shows a similar heavy-machinery cell.

An ABB IRB 6700 grinding a steel part in Teqram's EasyGrinder cell at Ancofer. Photo: ABB

For homes, the link is indirect. Most people meet hydraulic cylinders in a car jack, a garage lift or a lifting seat, and cheaper production could lower those prices a little, though the cylinder is a small share of what you pay. I found no ABB project for hydraulic cylinders, so every fit described here is a possibility, and any real cell would need a proper study of the parts, the volumes and the safety rules. What looks likely is steady robot welding and machine tending on cylinder lines, with vision added as it becomes easier to commission.

A red bottle hydraulic jack held in a hand beside a car tire. Photo: B722N / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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