Materials Testing Robot: Tensile Labs and ABB Arms

Before anyone trusts a steel coil or a new alloy, somebody pulls a piece of it apart. In a tensile test a machine grips a specimen and stretches it until it breaks, and for most of the 160 years since David Kirkaldy opened his test house in London, people loaded those specimens by hand. A materials testing robot does the loading, measuring and sorting instead. This post follows the job from Kirkaldy's works in Southwark and the self-recording machines that came after him, to the robot cells testing steel in Shanghai and Wales today and the alloy foundry Texas A&M announced in October 2026. It ends with where ABB robots could fit.

Brian Cheshire, an engineer in the Mechanical and Environmental Testing Lab at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, works at an Instron testing machine in 2020. Photo: NASA/Isaac Watson (public domain)

How Victorian test houses pulled metal apart by hand

A Scottish engineer, David Kirkaldy, pioneered the testing of materials as a paid service. He ran tensile tests on wrought iron and steel at Robert Napier's works in Glasgow between 1858 and 1861 and published the results in 1862. Then he designed his own testing machine, paid for it himself and had it built by Greenwood & Batley of Leeds. The machine works horizontally, with the load applied by a hydraulic cylinder and ram. It is 47 feet 7 inches long, weighs about 116 tons and reached London unfinished in September 1865. From 1866 Kirkaldy tested materials for bridges and other structures for paying clients, and he later tested tie bars from the failed Tay Bridge for the official inquiry.

Heavy iron links and long threaded bars on the big horizontal testing machine at the Kirkaldy Testing Museum in Southwark, London. Photo: Lars Plougmann / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

In 1874 the business moved into purpose-built works at 99 Southwark Street, with "Facts not Opinions" cut above the door. The ground floor is now the Kirkaldy Testing Museum, and the 1865 machine still works. In the United States, Tinius Olsen, a Norwegian-born engineer who arrived in 1869, patented a testing machine in 1880. In 1891 the Franklin Institute gave him its Elliott Cresson Medal for an autographic testing machine, and a patent he received that year is titled Recording Testing-Machine. Machines got stronger and began to draw their own results, but people still handled the specimens, measuring each one, often with calipers, and clamping it into the grips.

An Amsler universal testing machine with an autographic recorder at the US Army's Watertown Arsenal, March 1940. Photo: Watertown Arsenal (US Army) via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Recording was automated long before handling. By 1940 the US Army's Watertown Arsenal had an Amsler universal testing machine with an autographic recorder. In 1973 NASA's Lewis Research Center ran a materials processing laboratory where technicians worked among creep and tensile test equipment to study metals and superalloys. Automatic handling came later. ZwickRoell, a testing machine maker based in Ulm, says it has more than 40 years of experience with automated testing systems and has delivered more than 900 of them, now about 40 a year. In its systems an operator sorts specimens into magazines, and the machine takes care of transport, testing and the sorting of the broken pieces.

Technicians at work in the creep facility of the Materials Processing Laboratory at NASA's Lewis Research Center, 1973, a lab with creep and tensile test equipment. Photo: NASA (public domain)

Robot cells in steel plants and alloy labs today

ZwickRoell's roboTest R uses a six-axis industrial robot to move specimens. The operator fills a magazine from a safe area of the system, even while tests are running, and the arm then feeds up to 400 specimens through tensile, flexure, compression or impact tests on machines rated up to 2,500 kN, sorting the remains into good and bad. At Baoshan Iron & Steel in Shanghai, a roboTest L, built for specimens up to 1 kg, reads a QR code on each steel specimen, measures its cross section and centres it in hydraulic grips for a test to ISO 6892. While one specimen is being pulled, the system measures the next.

A Tinius Olsen 50 kN tensile testing machine with grips and testing software on a lab bench. Photo: Wikiadma / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

In Wales, Tata Steel's Trostre works in Llanelli makes about 400,000 tonnes a year of coated steel for food and drink cans, aerosols and paint tins. Every finished coil is released only after its mechanical properties are checked, and a ZwickRoell roboTest L, chosen to run 24/7, now does that tensile testing. Research labs are pushing further. On 22 October 2026 Texas A&M University announced the Aggie AI Foundry, funded by a $2 million grant from the WoodNext Foundation. AI will propose new metal alloys, and computer-controlled arms working along an assembly line will mix, melt and test them. The university expects to cut alloy development from months to a week or less.

An industrial shunting locomotive at Trostre, Llanelli, home of the Tata Steel works whose coils are tensile tested by a robot cell, 2020. Photo: Gareth James / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

None of the sources for these cells names the robot maker, so an ABB role here is a possibility. ABB does sell arms that suit the job. Loading a testing machine is machine tending, one of the applications ABB lists for its GoFa cobot, and GoFa can share space with people without fencing, so a technician could keep running manual tests beside it. With the Ultra Accuracy option GoFa reaches path accuracy down to 0.03 mm, and ABB pitches it for precision quality checks in metrology. For heavy plate specimens, the IRB 4600 carries up to 60 kg. GoFa cobots already do lab work elsewhere: XtalPi bought more than 100 of them in 2022 for automated synthesis and crystallization workstations in Shanghai.

An ABB GoFa cobot inside one of the automated laboratory workstations that ABB and XtalPi produce together in China. Photo: ABB

Dark labs, mobile robots and who reads the results

ZwickRoell describes a SmartLab where raw material goes in and complete test results come out a few hours later without manual work, and even a "Dark Lab" that runs its tests with no human involvement. It says that for many companies these ideas are already real. Mobile robots are part of the plan, carrying specimens between machines or linking separate labs into one. ABB's Flexley Mover P604 AMR builds its own maps with 3D Visual SLAM, positions itself to within 10 mm and needs no extra infrastructure, so in principle it could do that carrying. Chemistry labs are moving the same way, as our post on robot-run research labs shows.

ABB's Flexley Mover P604 autonomous mobile robot, which maps its surroundings with 3D Visual SLAM. Photo: ABB

People at home meet this work indirectly. The steel in a food can or a paint tin from a plant like Trostre comes from a coil that a robot cell tested before release. In factories, the likely users are steel and plastics plants that test large numbers of specimens, and new alloy labs like the one at Texas A&M. Such a cell can be planned on a screen first. A 2020 bachelor's thesis at Universidad Pontificia Comillas (ICAI) designed an automated tensile and hardness testing system around an industrial robot and checked it in simulation with ABB's RobotStudio software, without building any hardware.

An engineer holds a FlexPendant beside a GoFa cobot fitted with a pointed probe, from ABB's launch of the Ultra Accuracy feature. Photo: ABB

Cost comes first: for a small lab that tests a few pieces a day, a robot cell is hard to justify, and ZwickRoell says robot-based testing is typically used where specimen throughput is high. Safety gets better in one way, since the robot removes the risk of cuts from rough edges and of heavy specimens falling, but the cell still needs a safe loading area or a cobot built to work next to people. The skills needed change as well. ZwickRoell says a new user can run a standard plastics tensile test after an hour or two of instruction, yet an experienced specialist still has to judge the results. At Texas A&M, Raymundo Arróyave compares students to line cooks who want to be chefs but spend their time "chopping onions and cutting tomatoes."

The Instron 1000HDX universal testing machine at the Oregon Department of Transportation's materials lab in Salem, 2015. It replaced a Baldwin machine that had served the lab for 40 years. Photo: Oregon Department of Transportation / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

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