Pallet Repair Robot: From Hammer Yards to ABB Arms

A pallet repair robot does one of the dullest and most dangerous jobs in logistics: pulling broken boards off used wooden pallets and nailing on new ones so the pallet can go back into service. This post looks at how pallets spread with the forklift, how pooling companies such as CHEP built repair depots, and how recyclers moved from hammers and pry bars to laser inspection, robotic dismantlers and sorting lines. It then covers where ABB palletizers, vision and mobile robots fit as warehouses automate, and what still makes pallet repair hard to hand over to robots.

A wooden pallet with a broken deck board, the kind of damage repair lines look for. Photo: Mdornseif / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How the wooden pallet spread and who fixed it by hand

The pallet grew up with the lift truck. Howard T. Hallowell filed the earliest pallet patent, for a "Lift Truck Platform", in 1924, and George G. Raymond and William C. House received a patent for a pallet jack in 1939. The forklift and the supply needs of the Second World War then put pallets into wide use. A navy photo from Charleston in June 1945 shows a forklift bringing a pallet of gas bottles to a new ship.

A forklift brings a pallet of gas bottles to USS Ray K. Edwards at the Charleston Naval Shipyard, June 1945. Photo: U.S. Navy via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Pallets also gave rise to pooling. When the war ended in 1945, the United States Army left at least 60,000 wooden pallets at its bases in Australia. The Australian government used them, and the handling equipment around them, to set up the Commonwealth Handling Equipment Pool, or CHEP, as a national service. Brambles bought CHEP in 1958 and turned it into a business. A pooled pallet comes back to a service centre after each trip, where it is checked, repaired if needed and sent out again.

A recycled Australian standard pallet made from pine. Photo: Aeonx / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

For decades that checking and repair was done by hand. Workers looked over each pallet, pried off cracked deck boards or cut them away, and nailed on replacements. The scale is large. About two billion pallets are in use in the United States alone, and about half a billion new ones are made there each year. Alliance Automation, a maker of pallet recycling machines, describes tearing down pallets by hand as dangerous and tedious work.

A Euro pallet repaired outside the licensed repair system, photographed in Germany in 2007. Photo: Mdornseif / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Laser inspection, robotic dismantlers and automated warehouses

By the 2010s the largest depots were automating. In October 2017 CHEP opened an upgraded service centre at South Ockendon in England, spending more than 2 million pounds on automatic fault detection and repair. A laser system checks each pallet for damage, an automatic cutter removes broken parts, a robotic arm places replacement boards and a roller nailer makes sure no nail stands more than 3 mm proud. Capacity rose from 4.1 million to 6.2 million pallets a year with about 85 full-time staff, and operators no longer have to judge most pallets themselves.

Stacked wooden pallets waiting for reuse. Photo: W.carter / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Recyclers in North America have similar tools. Alliance Automation sells a Robotic Pallet Dismantler that it says can tear down 100 pallets an hour, and a Multi Pallet Sorting Line that stacks up to 30 kinds of pallets automatically and sends broken ones to repair. It has also worked with Zira on AI tools for its dismantling stations and saw lines. Pressure comes from the other end of the chain too. On 1 October Pallet Enterprise looked at how the automation race among retail giants is reshaping palletization. Robotic palletizers and automated storage need pallets that are flat and sound, and Alliance sells a machine vision system that screens pallets for defects before they enter automated storage.

The entrance to CHEP's Birmingham service centre in England, 2024, one of the depots where pooled pallets are checked and repaired. Photo: Richard Law / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

ABB robots work on the palletizing side of this chain. The IRB 660 is a four-axis palletizer with 3.15 m of reach and up to 250 kg of payload, and ABB says it can serve up to four infeed conveyors and two pallet stacks at once. The ABB Robotic Depalletizer uses ABB's own vision sensor and machine learning to unload mixed boxes from pallets up to 2.8 m high, at up to 750 cycles an hour. ABB has not announced a pallet repair cell, but the same parts (a large arm, a nailing tool and a 3D camera) are what a repair cell needs, so it is a realistic possibility.

An ABB IRB 660 palletizing robot stacking boxed products at the end of a line. Photo: ABB

What a pallet repair robot still has to learn

Full repair without a person at each station is the next step. Inspection and teardown are already automated in the best plants, but deciding how to fix a pallet is harder. Each broken pallet is different: a split board, a missing block, a nail sticking out, or wood that is wet or rotten. A robot needs vision that can spot all of these, a gripper that can hold rough timber, and a nail tool that drives nails where the wood is sound. Programs like this are usually built and tested first in RobotStudio.

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

Moving pallets around the plant is easier to automate today. ABB's Flexley Mover autonomous mobile robots carry loads around a site without fixed tracks, and a repair yard could use them to shuttle stacks between sorting, repair and storage. In a warehouse the pallets then meet palletizing robots of the kind we described in our post on truck unloading and palletizing. Those robots, and the automated storage behind them, work best with pallets that come back flat and sound.

An ABB Flexley Mover P604 among wooden pallets; it finds its way with 3D Visual SLAM. Photo: ABB

Cost and skills are the open problems. Automation is a big purchase for a pallet recycler, so Alliance offers a payback calculator and financing to make the case. The company says its goal has been to keep employees and give them the skills to oversee the machines. Safety improves when people no longer swing hammers or pull boards apart by hand, but the remaining staff need to learn to maintain vision systems, robots and nailers. Wood also varies from pallet to pallet, which keeps humans in the loop for the hardest repairs.

A truck carrying a full load of wooden pallets. Photo: Cullen328 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Innovation

AI solutions for effortless ABB robot control.

Automation

Robotics

ceojohntran@chatwithrobot.net

+84905311611

© 2025. All rights reserved.

qtran1215@gmail.com