Paint Can Filling Robot: Mills to ABB Palletizers

How the paint can filling robot line grew from hand ground pigments and Sherwin-Williams tins to robotic palletizing, and where ABB IRB 460 and IRB 660 fit.

INDUSTRIAL ROBOTICS

Chat With Robot

10/7/20265 min read

Most cans of wall paint in a store have passed through filling heads, lidders and a paint can filling robot line before reaching the shelf, and almost nobody thinks about it. This post follows the job from painters grinding their own colours by hand, through the first ready-mixed paint sold in tins, to the robotic filling and palletizing lines that were running by 1990. Then it looks at Sherwin-Williams' expanded plant in North Carolina, opened in September 2026, and at where ABB robots such as the IRB 460 and IRB 660 palletizers could fit in paint plants and paint stores.

Three open metal paint cans filled with red, blue and green paint seen from above

Open cans of red, blue and green paint. Photo: United Soybean Board / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

How paint went from mortar and pestle into the tin

For centuries painters made their own paint. They ground pigment and oil into a paste by hand with a mortar and pestle, and the white lead powder exposed them to lead poisoning. In 1718 Marshall Smith invented a "Machine or Engine for the Grinding of Colors" in England, and a seller of the time claimed that colour ground in a horse mill would paint twelve yards of work, where colour ground any other way would not cover half that. In the Netherlands, windmills such as De Kat, a paint mill dating from 1782, ground pigments with wind power.

A dark wooden windmill with sails above a green shed under a cloudy sky

De Kat, a paint mill from 1782, at the Zaanse Schans in Zaandam, Netherlands. Photo: Txllxt TxllxT / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The tin came later. Henry Sherwin invested in a paint distributorship in 1866, and in 1873 the company took over a former Standard Oil cooperage building as its first factory. In 1875 Sherwin-Williams started selling ready-mixed paint, so customers no longer blended the parts themselves and could use the paint straight from the tin. In 1941 it brought out Kem-Tone, a water based, fast drying interior paint, sold with the Roller-Koater applicator. All of those tins still had to be filled, closed, labelled and stacked by a factory somewhere.

Old black and white photo of a brick building with a Paints sign and horse carts outside

A Sherwin-Williams Co. paint building in Boston, photographed between 1900 and 1907. Photo: Boston Wharf Company via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Robots reached the end of the line first. In 1990 the trade journal Pigment and Resin Technology reported that International Paint, then part of the Courtaulds Coatings group, had spent about £300,000 on new filling and robotic palletising equipment at its marine paint plant in Felling, Gateshead, and that the machinery doubled production there. In the United States, Kelly-Moore Paint put in robot palletizing with Intelligrated, using Motoman EPL 160 robots built for palletizing: four axis arms with their air and signal lines routed inside the arm.

White factory buildings and a chimney on a river bank seen from a passing boat

A paint factory on the riverside at Felling, Gateshead, 2013. Photo: Robert Graham / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Paint can filling robots at Sherwin-Williams and beyond in 2026

On 30 September 2026 Sherwin-Williams held the grand opening of its expanded architectural paint plant in Statesville, North Carolina, now its largest plant in North America. The project added a 36,000 square foot extension to the existing 200,000 square foot factory, a new 800,000 square foot distribution and fleet center, and four rail spurs. The company says the nearly 50,000 square feet of improvements include automation upgrades, adding millions of gallons of yearly capacity and a lot of pallet storage. It planned to invest at least $300 million and add more than 180 jobs.

Overhead view of open paint tins in purple, blue, yellow, green and red in a box

Open tins of paint in many colours, each filled almost to the rim. Photo: Rpperini / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Ownership of paint plants is changing too. On 5 October 2026 AkzoNobel agreed to sell its Southeast Asia decorative paints business to Nippon Paint for $1.35 billion. Whoever owns the plants, the work inside looks much the same. Base paint is mixed in large tanks, filled into quarts, gallons and five gallon pails, lidded, labelled and stacked onto pallets for trucks and rail cars. Filling heads are dedicated machines, and the heavy lifting of full containers at the end of the line is where robots took over first.

A brown factory building with a round Hammerite sign seen through green railings

The Hammerite paint factory at Prudhoe, Northumberland, 2011. Photo: Andrew Curtis / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

ABB robots already fit that end of line work. The IRB 460 is a four axis palletizer with a 2.4 meter reach and a 110 kg payload, and ABB rates it at up to 2,190 cycles per hour with a 60 kg load. The larger IRB 660 belongs to the same palletizing family, and both can take ABB's FlexGripper Claw for bags. We found no source naming an ABB palletizer in a paint plant, so this is a match on paper only. Our post on truck unloading and palletizing shows the same robots in warehouses.

A white ABB palletizing robot stacking cartons onto pallets beside a conveyor

An ABB IRB 660 palletizer at work on a stacking line. Photo: ABB

What comes next for robots in paint plants and paint stores

In factories the next step is mixed loads. Retailers order a few cans of many colours and sizes, so robots have to build mixed pallets of quarts, gallons and pails without crushing lids. Vision and better grippers help, and lines like this are usually built and checked first in RobotStudio so that reach, cycle time and pallet patterns are right before the robot arrives. Solvent based paint adds a safety problem. ABB's IRB 5500 paint robot is built for explosive paint booth air, and similar protection would be needed near open solvent paint.

A copper colored four axis ABB robot with a layer gripper above roller conveyors

An ABB four axis palletizing robot with a layer gripper in a packaging line cell. Photo: ABB

In the store, staff still do most of the tinting: they add colourant to a can of base paint at a dispensing machine, close the lid and put the can on a shaker. A collaborative robot such as the ABB GoFa CRB 15000, which slows and stops when it senses contact, could in principle move cans between dispenser and shaker while staff talk to customers. That is a possibility only, and we found no paint retailer using one. The main question is the cost of a cobot cell compared with a part time job.

A white ABB collaborative robot arm mounted on a work table

An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 cobot at a work table. Photo: ABB

Homeowners never see these robots, but they affect what reaches the shelf, including how many colours and sizes a store can stock and how evenly each can is filled and sealed. The leftover cans in a garage after a renovation are the other end of the same chain. Over the next years, the cost of palletizing cells, explosion protection and the skills to program and maintain them will decide how quickly smaller paint makers follow plants like Statesville. For a wider view of robots and paint, see our post on ABB paint robots.

Empty grey paint buckets and cans stacked in the back of a work vehicle

Used paint cans and buckets left after renovating a small building in Shibuya, Tokyo, 2024. Photo: Syced / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

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