Lighting Fixture Manufacturing With ABB Robots

Lighting fixture manufacturing is the work of turning a light source into something you can hang on a ceiling or bolt to a pole. That means a housing, a reflector and lens, a driver, wiring and a final test. For most of its history people did this by hand, even while the bulbs themselves came off some of the fastest machines in industry. This post covers how lamps and fittings were built in the Edison era, how LEDs changed the job, which robots already place lenses and boards in luminaires, where ABB robots could fit, and why people are still on these lines.

An automated gripper handles an LED board on the luminaire production line at ATP Iluminación in Arre, Navarra. Photo: Borges Gracián / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From Edison's lamp works to fluorescent fittings

Edison's first lamp factory was a small works at Menlo Park, New Jersey. Production later moved to the Edison Lamp Works in Harrison, New Jersey, a town whose motto was "The Beehive of Industry". A lamp was hand made from start to finish. In the 1880s bulbs were blown into wooden or cast iron molds by a team of three, two gatherers and a master gaffer, and Corning Glass Works turned out around 150 bulbs an hour that way. Other workers then sealed in the filaments, pumped out the air and packed the finished lamps.

Workers pose in front of the original Edison Lamp Works at Menlo Park, New Jersey, in 1880. Photo: Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The glass bulb was the first piece of lighting to be automated. Libbey Glass adapted its bottle blowing machine into the Westlake machine, and Corning answered with machines of its own. In 1926 Corning installed the Ribbon Machine at its factory in Wellsboro, Pennsylvania. By 1939 it was producing 1,000 bulbs a minute, and it kept making incandescent bulbs into the 21st century. The fittings those bulbs went into were another matter. Metal had to be formed and finished, and each fixture was wired up by a person at a bench.

Workers at the Harrison Lamp Works in New Jersey, around 1890, when lamps were made and packed by hand. Photo: Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Fluorescent lighting made the fixture a bigger product. General Electric started selling fluorescent lamps in 1938 in four tube sizes, and they went into fixtures made by Lightolier, Artcraft Fluorescent Lighting Corporation and Globe Lighting. A fluorescent fitting needs a ballast to control the current, so every unit had a metal body, a ballast, lamp holders and wiring to put together. Machines took on more of the sheet metal work over the following decades. Fitting the ballast, wiring the lamp holders and checking that the fixture lit stayed largely in human hands at assembly benches.

A recessed ceiling fitting with two U shaped fluorescent tubes. Photo: BrokenSphere / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Building LED luminaires today

LEDs made the fixture an electronic product. A modern luminaire has a circuit board with LEDs, an optic or lens over them, a heat sink, a driver and often sensors or a wireless module. US makers are not going back. On 8 October 2026 Facilities Dive reported on the Senate fight over a bill to bring incandescent bulbs back. Eric Bursch of NEMA said, "Our members no longer make incandescent bulbs," and said US manufacturers had spent billions of dollars moving to LED technology. NEMA and the American Lighting Association also warned that fixtures redesigned for the lower heat of LEDs are not rated to run incandescent lamps.

Inside an ATP outdoor LED luminaire: the driver housing and heat sink under the open cover. Photo: Borges Gracián / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Small, precise parts like these suit robots. Integrator QComp built a cell for Ruud Lighting in which a vision guided ABB FlexPicker reads characters etched on each lens, works out its type and orientation, and places it into an LED light engine. At Signify's plant in Winterswijk in the Netherlands, a Techman cobot builds light engines from five parts (housing, LED board, mixing cups, diffusers and main reflector) at 130 pieces an hour. Car lighting has gone further with automation, as our post on headlamp assembly shows.

ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker robots placing small items at high speed, the robot type used in Ruud Lighting's lens cell. Photo: ABB

For a fixture maker, several ABB robots match jobs on the line. An IRB 360 FlexPicker can place lenses and small optics at high speed. A GoFa CRB 15000 cobot can drive screws into a housing or hold a board while a person routes wires, and it stops when it touches someone. A compact IRB 1300 or IRB 1200 could dispense thermal paste under an LED board, lay a gasket bead around a lens, or load units into a test rig that measures light output and power draw. Cells like this are usually laid out and tried first in RobotStudio, before anyone buys hardware.

An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 cobot at a work table, sized to work next to people on assembly jobs. Photo: ABB

Where luminaire factories are heading

The biggest pressure on fixture factories is variety. One luminaire family can come in many lengths, colour temperatures, beam angles, drivers and mounting options, and orders are often small. A fixed machine built for one model struggles with that. A cell that switches products when it loads a new program copes better, which is why cobots and small six axis arms fit. Vision that reads part markings, like the camera on Ruud's lens cell, also lets a robot handle a mixed stream of parts without a separate setup for each one.

An ABB IRB 1300 small industrial robot with an operator holding the FlexPendant. Photo: ABB

Homes are part of this too. Smart bulbs and connected fixtures put radios, sensors and firmware into products that used to be a lamp holder and a switch, and each unit has to be flashed and tested before it ships. LEDs last longer, so people replace fittings less often and makers compete on features and finish. For a home buyer, more automation in the factory should mostly show up as steadier quality from one fixture to the next. The light on the ceiling will look and work the same way it does now.

Warm white 2200 K LED luminaires by ATP Lighting in Plaza de los Coches, Cartagena de Indias, Colombia. Photo: Borges Gracián / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Several problems are still open. Many lighting companies are mid sized, and a robot cell has to pay for itself across many short runs, which is harder than on a car line. Wires and cables are floppy and still awkward for robots to route, so mixed lines where people do the wiring and robots handle placing, screwing and testing will probably stay common. Cobots that limit their force make safety less of a hurdle. Someone on site still has to program and maintain the cells, though, and that skill is in short supply.

The Valinte lighting fixture factory in Vantaa, Finland, in 1984, a mid sized maker of the kind that dominates the trade. Photo: Scan-Foto Oy / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

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