Printer Manufacturing: From Typewriters to ABB Robot Cells

Printer manufacturing is a good test of how far robots have come in assembly. A printer holds paper rollers, motors, gears, a carriage, cables and a printhead with nozzles thinner than a hair, and every unit must pass a print test before it ships. This post follows the job from the typewriter works of the 1870s to inkjet and laser printers, then looks at a new inkjet plant that Ricoh announced in September 2026 and at where ABB robots, from SCARA arms to the YuMi cobot, could fit on the line.

An inkjet printer with its covers removed, showing the carriage and rollers inside. Photo: Snewkirk7953 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

How typewriters and early printers were built

The first commercially successful typewriter was patented in 1868 in Milwaukee by Christopher Latham Sholes, Frank Haven Hall, Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soule. Remington began producing it on 1 March 1873 in Ilion, New York, and the machine was sold as the Sholes and Glidden Type-Writer, which gave us the word typewriter. The QWERTY layout was settled on the 1874 models. Each machine was a stack of levers, springs and typebars, and every one of them had to be fitted and adjusted before the keys felt right.

A Sholes and Glidden typewriter of 1873, the model Remington began producing that year. Photo: Tony Casillo / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Typewriters stayed mechanical for almost a century. In 1961 IBM introduced the Selectric, which replaced the typebars with a spherical typeball and dominated office typewriters for at least two decades. Olivetti marketed the first electronic daisywheel typewriter in 1976. The mechanism was still built from many small parts. When IBM sold its typewriter division in 1991 to the newly formed Lexmark, the business was already turning toward printers that took their instructions from computers.

An IBM Selectric I, the 1961 typewriter that used a spherical typeball. Photo: steve lodefink / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Computer printers came from several directions. Gary Starkweather at Xerox proposed in 1969 to draw images on a copier drum with a laser. IBM released the 3800 in 1976, the first commercial laser printer, at 215 pages per minute. The Xerox 9700 reached the market in 1977. HP released the LaserJet in 1984, the first laser printer aimed at the mass market, using a Canon engine and selling for about $3,500. Inkjet had its own line, from Siemens in 1951 to the thermal inkjet work at Canon and HP from the late 1970s, with Epson and Brother adding piezo printheads in consumer printers in the late 1980s.

A woman beside a Xerox 9700 laser printer, which reached the market in 1977. Photo: Xerox / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

A new inkjet plant and where ABB robots fit

The recent news comes from Japan. On 18 September 2026 Ricoh announced a four story building of about 39,000 square meters at its Atsugi site in Kanagawa, Japan. Construction is due to start in November 2026 and finish in the first half of fiscal 2028, and the goal is to more than double inkjet head production capacity by fiscal 2028. Ricoh says the plant will gather work now spread across several buildings and add automated lines, robotics and AI supported quality decisions. Inkjet heads are the hard part to make, since each one has to eject droplets evenly from every nozzle.

The rubber cap that seals the printhead nozzles of an Epson Stylus S22 inkjet printer. Photo: Raimond Spekking / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Small robots have been part of electronics assembly since the SCARA arm. Hiroshi Makino of the University of Yamanashi led the work in Japan, with a prototype in 1978, a second in 1980, and Sankyo Seiki, Pentel and NEC presenting it as a new assembly concept in 1981. The arm is stiff vertically and compliant sideways, which suits pressing a round pin into a round hole. Epson, a printer maker, also sells industrial robots. ABB entered SCARA in 2016 with the IRB 910SC, which carries up to 6 kg, and launched the IRB 930 in 2023 for electronics and battery assembly.

An engineer with an ABB IRB 930 SCARA robot, launched in 2023 for electronics and battery assembly. Photo: ABB

A printer line has many small parts and many different models. The YuMi IRB 14000 is a dual arm cobot made for small parts assembly, and the single arm YuMi IRB 14050 suits a station with limited space. We looked at a similar job in PCB assembly robot cells and at fastening in screwdriving robot cells. I found no source that says ABB robots build printers for a named maker, so this is a possibility. A line builder would simulate the cell first in RobotStudio, then add vision to check parts.

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

What printer making needs next

Printer plants need bigger arms too. ABB's IRB 1300 is a compact industrial robot that works in a tight cell, and the new generation IRB 1200, launched in 2025, handles machine tending and small parts. In a printer plant these could load trays, move assembled units to the test station or tend molding and metal parts machines. The robot has to match the pace of the line and give way to people, and ABB's SafeMove covers the safety side.

An ABB IRB 1300 small industrial robot with an operator holding the FlexPendant. Photo: ABB

Test and inspection are the steps a robot can take over most easily. Each printer has to feed paper, print a page and show that every nozzle fires. A robot can load the unit, press the buttons and carry the page to a camera, while the software logs the result. The same arm can then repack the printer. Whether it pays off depends on cost, since a cheap home printer leaves little margin for equipment, and on how often the model changes, which is why quick programming matters.

The new generation ABB IRB 1200, launched in 2025, a compact arm for machine tending and small parts. Photo: ABB

Over the next few years the likely pattern is more automation in the delicate steps, such as printhead handling, and more mixed lines where one cell handles several models. Plants like Ricoh's at Atsugi will show how much of the line robots can take over, and whether the same cells can switch between models without long stops. The open problems are the same as in other electronics lines: cost per station, safety around moving arms, and finding people who can program and maintain cells.

An inkjet printer opened on a workbench, the sort of mechanism a test cell has to handle. Photo: Klosito / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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