Medical Device Manufacturing with ABB Cobots

Many of the devices in a modern hospital started as something a doctor or engineer built by hand at home. Medical device manufacturing has since grown into a regulated industry where every catheter, cannula and sensor has to be made the same way every time and traced back to its batch. This post follows that path from the first pacemakers and balloon catheters to cleanrooms and automated assembly. It covers this week's news from contract manufacturer Jabil, how ABB's YuMi and GoFa cobots already work on device lines, and what still stands in the way of automating more of this careful, small-batch work.

The tip of a dilatation catheter with its balloon, next to a ruler in centimeters. Photo: Magnus Maier / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Medical devices built in garages, attics and kitchens

Some of the best known devices began in very small workshops. In 1957 Earl Bakken, who had founded Medtronic with his brother-in-law Palmer Hermundslie in a small garage, built the first external, battery-powered, transistorized pacemaker that a patient could wear. Until then the pacemakers used after heart surgery on children were large machines on carts that ran on wall current. Bakken's company worked mainly with the University of Minnesota hospital, where surgeon C. Walton Lillehei operated on children with heart defects, and the wearable unit freed those patients from the cart.

Medtronic founder Earl Bakken, who built the first wearable battery-powered pacemaker in 1957, photographed in 2007. Photo: Bobak Ha'Eri and Paul Schmokel / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

Catheters had similar beginnings. Thomas Fogarty worked out his embolectomy catheter in his attic. He took a flexible urethral catheter and fixed the cut-off pinky tip of a size 5 latex surgical glove to its end as the balloon. In Zürich, Andreas Gruentzig made the balloon catheters for his first coronary angioplasty at his kitchen table, and on 16 September 1977 he used one to open a narrowed artery in an awake patient. Hand-made prototypes like these proved the idea, but making millions of them called for something else.

A Venflon intravenous cannula, a small catheter device made in very large numbers. Photo: Fifo / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5)

That problem was solved with cleanrooms and careful hand work. In 1960 Willis Whitfield at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico drew up the first plans for the modern cleanroom, which flushes particles away with a constant flow of filtered air. Medical device plants adopted cleanrooms too. Molding and extrusion machines could turn out plastic parts and tubing by the million, but joining small, soft parts such as tubing, balloons and hubs, and checking them, often still needed skilled hands at a bench.

A gowned technician prepares a sample in a NASA clean room in 1968, eight years after Willis Whitfield's cleanroom design. Photo: NASA Glenn Research Center via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

How cobots work on device lines today

Contract manufacturers are now putting money into automation. On 1 October 2026 PlasticsToday reported on Jabil, which builds products for medical and other customers in more than 120 factories. Andy Priestley, who runs its global operations, said its regulated customers in healthcare and automotive "require validated processes, consistent quality, and traceability," and that Jabil is expanding automation in material movement and inspection. He added that flexible automation lets the company "adapt and reuse equipment as products change." Earlier this year Jabil announced an investment of more than 102 million dollars in Henderson County, North Carolina, to make precision molded parts for healthcare on high-speed automated assembly lines.

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

ABB robots already do some of the fiddliest jobs. At GE Healthcare's prototype line in Helsinki, a single-arm YuMi IRB 14050 lays long glue beads that must follow a matchbox-sized sensor part precisely in three dimensions, a task that fast-setting glue made very hard to do by hand. The single-arm YuMi has seven axes and a 0.5 kg payload, and it is small enough to share a bench with people. The dual-arm YuMi IRB 14000 handles small parts with two hands, much like an operator at a bench.

A single-arm YuMi IRB 14050 in its cell on GE Healthcare's prototype line in Helsinki. Photo: ABB

For heavier or larger tasks, the GoFa CRB 15000 cobot carries more and still limits its power and force for work next to people, so it could load machines, move trays into a test station or pack finished devices. ABB is also moving deeper into healthcare. In July 2026 it announced a global collaboration with Roche Diagnostics. The first projects are robot applications that handle, sort and organize slides for Roche's pathology business, and autonomous mobile robots that carry samples and consumables between instruments in central labs, much like the systems in our post on hospital lab automation. Both target work that labs struggle to staff.

Engineers beside the single-arm YuMi cell at GE Healthcare's prototype line in Helsinki. Photo: ABB

What comes next for automated medical device assembly

The first hurdle is regulation. Every change to a validated process has to be documented and often re-validated, so device makers move slowly even when a robot could do the job well. Simulation helps here: a cell can be built and tested in RobotStudio before it is installed, and the same program and recorded data then support the validation. Cameras for inspection and software that logs every step of every part give the traceability Priestley described, and a robot that applies the same glue bead or the same press force every time makes the validation report easier to write.

FDA scientist Matthew di Prima shows Commissioner Scott Gottlieb a 3D printer at the agency's device center in Silver Spring, Maryland, 2017. Photo: U.S. Food and Drug Administration via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Then there is the material itself. Catheter tubing bends, balloons tear and some glues set in seconds, which is why so much of this work stayed manual. Better grippers, force sensing and vision should let cobots take on more of it. Future products push in two directions at once: high-volume disposables such as pens and cannulas, which suit fast automated lines, and personalized devices such as 3D printed prosthetics and implants, made in small numbers that need flexible cells.

A 3D printed Snap-Together RoboHand prosthetic examined at the FDA in 2013. Photo: U.S. Food and Drug Administration via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

People remain part of the line. Cleanroom operators who know the product well are hard to replace, and many will move from hand assembly to setting up and watching robots. Tools such as ABB's Wizard easy programming let them control robots with no code on the FlexPendant, which shortens training. Cost decides the pace, because a small device maker has to weigh a robot cell against a team that can switch between products in a day.

Programming a single-arm YuMi with Wizard on the FlexPendant. Photo: ABB

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