Paper Roll Handling Robot: From Hand Labour to ABB

A finished roll leaving a modern paper machine can be up to 5.2 metres wide and weigh up to 10 tonnes, and every one of them has to be wrapped, labelled, tested and stored before it ships. A paper roll handling robot rarely lifts the roll itself. It places the end covers, sticks on the labels and feeds samples to the lab while conveyors and cranes move the weight. This post follows the job from hand-made sheets and gangs of warehouse workers to today's robotized wrapping lines, then looks at where ABB, which has worked in pulp and paper for decades, fits in.

Rolls of finished newsprint at MacMillan Bloedel in the Fraser River Valley, British Columbia, September 1970. Photo: U.S. EPA DOCUMERICA via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

How paper rolls were made and moved by hand

Until 1799, paper was made one sheet at a time. A worker dipped a sheet mould into a vat of pulp slurry, lifted it out and let the water drain. That year Louis-Nicolas Robert of Essonnes, France, received a patent for a machine that made paper in a continuous web. The design was improved in Britain and installed at Frogmore Mill in 1803 and 1804. A continuous web needed somewhere to go, and paper machines gained reel and winder sections that wind the finished paper onto spools and slit it into the widths customers order.

Zanders paper machine PM 4, in service from 1889 to 1991, now shown at the LVR Industrial Museum in Bergisch Gladbach. Photo: Busbahnhof / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Moving those rolls stayed manual work for a long time. Photographs by Sam Hood, taken around Sydney and Newcastle in the first half of the 20th century, show workmen steering newsprint rolls into stacks in a warehouse with a crane hoist, and Dutch press photos show rolls being rolled by hand into a newspaper printer's store. Quality checks were manual too. Sappi's Somerset mill in Maine once checked the hardness profile of reels on its PM2 machine off line with a hand-held tester. By 2011 ABB optical caliper sensors there let operators correct reel building in real time.

Workmen stack newsprint rolls with a crane hoist in an Australian warehouse, from Sam Hood's studio collection. Photo: Australian National Maritime Museum via Wikimedia Commons (no known copyright restrictions)

Wrapping lines brought machines into the finishing area, where rolls are packed for shipping. Valmet's OptiWrap wrapping machines grew out of earlier StreamLine wrapping lines and are now built by the Finnish specialist Pesmel, which took over Valmet's roll handling and packing systems in 2014 after 20 years of cooperation. Automated guided vehicles that carry and stack paper rolls were in use by the 2000s. Yet even a modern OptiWrap Single machine, handling up to 50 rolls an hour, leaves the end covers and labels to an operator.

An automated guided vehicle built to carry and stack paper rolls, 2006. Photo: Egemin GmbH / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0 de)

Robots on today's wrapping lines and in the lab

Mills keep ordering new capacity. On 23 September 2026 Valmet said it will supply a complete board making line to a customer in Asia, from headbox to reel and winders, with automation systems included and start-up planned for 2028. A week later Toscotec announced a new PM15 tissue machine for Lucart's Laval-sur-Vologne mill in France, running at up to 1,800 metres a minute and taking the mill to 75,000 tonnes of tissue a year.

The dry end of paper machine PM 52 at Braviken paper mill in Norrköping, Sweden, where paper is wound onto reels. Photo: Work With Sounds / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

On OptiWrap Multi machines, robots apply the inner and outer end covers, called heads, and labels are put on by robot or another automatic applicator. Capacity rises to 100, 120 and up to 180 rolls an hour on the largest versions. In the high-capacity version an operator only drops the pallet of heads roughly in place, and a robot places each head exactly. These lines handle rolls up to 5.2 metres wide, 2.1 metres across and 10 tonnes in weight, so conveyors carry the roll and the robot works on its ends.

Labelled paper rolls waiting for newspaper printing at the Medienhaus in Schwarzach, Austria. Photo: Asurnipal / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB has worked with paper mills for a long time. It has supplied electrification to pulp and paper mills for more than 40 years, and in 2011 it bought Lorentzen & Wettre, a Swedish testing specialist founded in 1895, for SEK 750 million. Its L&W Autoline handles everything from sample preparation to the final reel report, up to ten times faster than manual testing. Cheng Loong's Binh Duong mill in Vietnam bought one to replace manual lab tests. I found no source naming ABB arms on a particular wrapping line, but an IRB 6700 has the reach and payload for head placing, and these cells are usually planned first in RobotStudio.

A technician works at the touchscreen of ABB's L&W Autoline automated paper testing system. Photo: ABB

Where roll handling goes next

The next step is joining the pieces up, so that a roll leaves the winder, is wrapped, labelled, weighed and stored without anyone touching it. Autonomous vehicles already move rolls in some plants, and mills will likely want the same software to track every roll from reel to truck. ABB's Flexley Mover AMRs, such as the P603 with its 1,500 kg payload, are too small for a full mill roll, but they could carry cores, small converting rolls and wrapping material around a plant. I found no mill doing this yet, so treat it as an idea.

The compact ABB Flexley Mover P603 carrying stacked crates. Photo: ABB

Homes see the end of this chain every day. The toilet and kitchen rolls in a cupboard start as large parent rolls on tissue machines like Lucart's, which makes toilet and towel paper, and are then cut, packed and stacked onto pallets. Palletizing robots such as the ABB IRB 660 already stack cases at the end of many packaging lines, and tissue converting lines are a natural place for them. More applications like this are collected in our overview of ABB robot use cases.

An ABB IRB 660 palletizer, a four axis robot used to stack goods at the end of a line. Photo: ABB

The open problems are weight, variety and people. A 10 tonne roll is dangerous if anything slips, so robots and vehicles near rolls need reliable safety zones, which ABB handles with SafeMove on its arms. Mills also make many roll widths and grades, and every change means new head sizes and labels. Workers worry about change as well: on 1 October 2026 ABC News reported that dozens of jobs could go at the Millicent tissue mill in South Australia, running since 1960, as its new owner Arbex plans a "transformation project".

Clamp forklifts unload paper rolls from the Finnish ferry Granö at Kiel's Nordhafen on the Kiel Canal, September 1976. Photo: Friedrich Magnussen / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0 de)

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