Pottery Wheel Robot: From Spinning Clay to ABB Arms

A pottery wheel robot has to do something that looks simple: hold a lump of wet clay on a spinning wheel and coax it into a bowl without collapsing it. The job takes years for a person to learn. This post follows the wheel from its ancient beginnings to the robot arms and clay printers of 2026, including a ceramic printing demonstration at Maker Faire Brno this month, and asks where ABB robots could fit in a craft that depends so much on feel.

A potter throwing a tall form at the wheel. Photo: Jim McDowell / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How the potter's wheel spun for five thousand years

The oldest forms of the wheel, called tournettes or slow wheels, were turned by hand or foot and were in use in the Near East around 3500 BC. A stone wheel found at Ur has been dated to about 3129 BC, although the exact origin is unclear and some scholars credit the Sumerians. On such a wheel the potter turned the disc by hand or foot between shaping passes, and the pot was still formed by hands working the clay. A flat disc under a lump of clay was the whole machine, and everything else depended on the potter.

A potter shaping a bowl on a simple hand turned wheel. Photo: Auctor quaerendae / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The fast or kick wheel arrived in the mid to late 3rd millennium BC. It added a heavy flywheel that stored energy from the potter's kicking, and that is what made throwing possible, because the clay could now spin fast and steady while both hands worked. Later wheels used cranks and levers, and the electric wheel, often controlled by a foot pedal, is now common in studios and schools. Human powered wheels remain in use, and the basic motion has barely changed.

A potter working at a kick wheel at a craft fair in Ukraine, 2008. Photo: Turzh / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Factories needed shapes that matched. Jiggering is a technique that shapes flat ware, such as plates, by lowering a shaped tool onto clay over a plaster mould, and it is described as an extension of the potter's wheel. Later still, robots entered ceramic plants. At Wade Ceramics in Stoke-on-Trent, ABB IRB 1600 robots with vision systems place each flagon at the entry to the first kiln, spaced so neighbors do not fuse during firing. Our post on ceramics glazing robots covers that line in more detail.

ABB robots with vision place flagons at the kiln entry at Wade Ceramics in Stoke-on-Trent. Photo: ABB

Robot throwing, clay printing and the ABB connection

The most recent news comes from Brno. Jan Vítek, a designer and lecturer at Brno University of Technology, ran a ceramic clay printing session at Maker Faire Brno on 17 and 18 October 2026. He built his own printer over about two years because commercial clay systems were expensive. A reservoir feeds a screw extruder and nozzle, and the machine lays soft clay along toolpaths, which he describes as computer assisted coil building. Designers can make one-off and small batch pieces without plaster moulds, and shapes with undercuts become possible.

A test painting robot for Delft Blue pottery, built with Delft University of Technology, on show at Royal Delft. Photo: Andy Li / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Vítek is also frank about limits. He finds that extrusion is less precise than powder based ceramic methods for high temperature technical parts, and moisture resistance, drying cracks and structural failures remain open problems for larger prints. The operator often stays with the machine, drying the print with warm air or supporting a feature with a scrap of clay. In research, MIT's Digital Pottery Wheel, shown at the CHI conference in May 2024, can print onto thrown forms, reshape printed forms by throwing, and record and replay hand made forms.

A clay printing arm laying layers on a WASP printer for a clay house, 2021. Photo: Alfredo Milano / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.5)

Robots have also tried the wheel itself. RoPotter, a research system on arXiv in 2024, watched spinning clay with two depth cameras at about 25 frames per second so a robot could shape it. In 2025 Soochow University researchers described a dual arm cobot for pottery using visual localization and path planning. These are lab projects, and I found no commercial robot that throws pots at home. ABB has no pottery wheel product either. Its link to the craft is industrial: the same kind of arms that load kilns and handle glazed ware, like the IRB 2600 at Wade, could one day hold a tool at a wheel as a possibility.

Lead-through teaching: moving an ABB GoFa arm by hand. Photo: ABB

Where a home pottery robot could go

Larger clay printing already exists. TECLA is a clay house printed by Crane WASP printers in 2021, a reminder that the method scales from a vase to a dwelling. For a home user the interesting machine is smaller: a desktop clay printer that makes a cup or a planter overnight. Cost is the first barrier, since Vítek built his own because commercial systems were pricey, and a second barrier is that clay changes with water content, so settings need tuning for every batch.

TECLA, a house printed in clay by Crane WASP printers, shown in 2021. Photo: Alfredo Milano / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.5)

ABB's role is clearer at a larger size. An ABB IRB 6700 printed the walls of the German Red Cross headquarters in Warendorf-Beckum, so large arms can already move an extruder along a path. That work is concrete, not clay, and it is covered in ABB Robots and 3D-Printed Concrete Buildings. A ceramic studio could test the same idea in RobotStudio first, simulating the path and the reach before a nozzle touches clay. I found no ABB customer printing clay, so this is a possibility. The skill a studio would need is programming a smooth toolpath, which is the same skill behind concrete printing.

An ABB IRB 6700 printing the walls of the German Red Cross headquarters in Warendorf-Beckum. Photo: ABB

Craft fairs still sell hand made bowls, and many buyers want the mark of a hand, so the likely future is mixed: robots throw and print simple forms, repeat a shape a hundred times, and leave decoration and finishing to people. The open problems are the ones Vítek lists, plus safety around spinning machinery and teaching an arm to feel clay through force sensing. Cobots such as GoFa, which stops when it senses contact, point the way for home use, though a spinning wheel adds hazards that no one has solved for a family kitchen table.

A potter with glazed bowls at a street fair in Summit, New Jersey, 2012. Photo: Tomwsulcer / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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