Printing Plate Automation: ABB Robots From Type to Press

An offset press cannot print a single sheet until someone has made its plates, carried them to the press and clamped them onto the cylinders. For most of printing history that was skilled hand work, and in many shops it still is. This post follows printing plate automation from that angle. It starts with hand-set type and hand-bent plates, follows the machines that took over parts of the job, and then looks at the plate logistics systems and cobots going into print shops this year, where ABB robots such as the GoFa CRB 15000 and the IRB 6700 fit, and what still holds automation back.

A Heidelberg Speedmaster sheetfed offset press in a print shop. Photo: Rémih / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

From the composing stick to curved newspaper plates

Before any machine set type, a compositor did it letter by letter. Movable metal type in Europe goes back to Johannes Gutenberg in Mainz in the middle of the fifteenth century, and the method barely changed for four hundred years. The compositor stood at a wooden case divided into small boxes, picked each letter, space and punctuation mark, and lined them up upside down in a hand-held composing stick. Full lines went to a galley and were locked into a frame for printing. When the job was done, every piece of type had to be cleaned and sorted back into its box.

A composing stick holding hand-set metal type above a type case. Photo: Willi Heidelbach / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.5)

Ottmar Mergenthaler, a German clockmaker who had moved to the United States in 1872, mechanized that job. He built the Linotype, and in July 1886 the first commercial machine went into use at the New York Tribune. An operator typed on a keyboard, and the machine assembled brass matrices and cast a whole line of type in molten metal. Linotype and similar hot metal machines set most newspaper text from the late nineteenth century until the 1970s and 1980s, when phototypesetting and then computer typesetting replaced them.

Linotype operators at the Chicago Defender newspaper, April 1941. Photo: Russell Lee / Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Plates went through a similar change. Newspapers on rotary presses cast curved stereotype plates from a mould of the page, and a worker bent and fitted each plate before it went onto the cylinder. Offset printing came from Ira Washington Rubel in the United States, who found in 1901 that printing from a rubber roller gave a sharper image, and whose offset press for paper followed in 1904. From the 1950s offset lithography was the main form of commercial printing. Its thin aluminium plates still had to be exposed, developed, punched, bent and loaded by people.

A worker bends a newspaper stereotype plate into a curve in a press built for the job. Photo: Willem van de Poll / Nationaal Archief via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Plate loaders, Plate to Unit and cobots in print shops

Computer to plate (CtP) machines removed the film step by imaging plates straight from the digital file, but someone still had to feed them. In October 2025 Heidelberg introduced the Compact Pallet Loader, which loads plates automatically into its Suprasetter 106 platesetters and can process 1,200 plates in one run, and the Compact Bender, which bends the imaged plates and can sort them by barcode. Druckstudio in Düsseldorf, an early user, said that filling plate cassettes by hand and bending imaged plates used to take a great deal of time.

A Heidelberg Suprasetter computer to plate machine, photographed in 2007. Photo: Ra Boe / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5)

Carrying plates from the plate room to the press is still manual in most shops. On 28 September 2026, Print Monthly reported that UK trade printer Route 1 Print had installed two Heidelberg Speedmaster XL 106-8P presses with Plate to Unit, a system that moves plates from the imaging department into the press's printing units without anyone handling them. The presses are part of a £12m investment at the company's 300,000 sq ft site in Rotherham. Route 1 says they already run up to 40% faster than its previous fleet, mostly because makeready is quicker.

Web offset presses and paper reels at the Sambad press in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India. Photo: Subhashish Panigrahi / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

After the press, the work turns into stacking, counting and palletizing, and ABB robots already do some of it. Vulcan Automation, a Hungarian integrator in ABB's Cobot Expert Program, built a cell for a German printing house that makes folded leaflets for the cosmetics and pharmaceutical sectors. A GoFa CRB 15000 with a 10 kg payload turns leaflets when needed, counts them, checks quality and fills paper trays. When a tray is full, it switches to a wider gripper and stacks the trays on pallets. Vulcan programmed it with RobotStudio and ABB's Wizard easy programming, and expects payback in under two years.

Vulcan Automation's GoFa cell that fills trays with folded leaflets and stacks them on a pallet. Photo: ABB

Where plate rooms and pressrooms are heading

Paper reels for web presses weigh far more than a person should lift, and moving them from the reel store to the reel stand is often still a forklift job. ABB has shown its large arms handling reels in other industries. At the German textile maker HUESKER, an IRB 6700 takes twine reels of up to 17 kg off the winding machines and stacks them on pallets. A similar arm could load paper reels or plate stacks, though that is a possible use and not an ABB print project. Our post on paper roll handling covers the mill side of the same problem.

An ABB IRB 6700 picks a twine reel off a winding machine at HUESKER in Germany. Photo: ABB

Autonomous mobile robots could link the stations. ABB's Flexley Mover AMRs carry carts and pallets without fixed tracks, so they could move plate carts from a CtP line to presses that have no built-in plate system, or take finished pallets to shipping. A printer would build and check such a layout first in RobotStudio. Readers outside the trade will hardly notice any of this, although it affects how cheaply a shop can turn around short runs such as photo books, packaging for small brands and local leaflets.

ABB's Flexley Mover P604 moves loads around a plant without fixed tracks. Photo: ABB

Several problems remain. Plate to Unit and similar systems come with new presses, and many shops run older machines that are hard to retrofit. Cobot cells next to press operators need a risk assessment and speed limits, and larger arms need fences or SafeMove zones. Digital presses that need no plates at all keep taking short runs away from offset. Press crews know ink, paper and register, but few have written robot code, so shops that automate will lean on simple tools such as ABB's Wizard easy programming and on training.

An exposed positive offset printing plate on a stand. Photo: Raboe001 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5)

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