Screwdriving Robot Cells: ABB Cobots on the Line

A screwdriving robot sounds like the simplest machine you could put on an assembly line: pick up a screw, put it in a hole, turn it. In practice it is one of the fussier tasks in assembly, which is why so many screws in phones, drives and appliances are still driven by people holding a power tool. This post covers how screws went from hand tools to powered drivers on assembly lines, how the first assembly robots took over part of the work, and where ABB's YuMi and GoFa cobots with smart screwdrivers fit today. It ends with the problems that still keep screwdriving partly manual.

A brass screw with a combined slotted and Phillips head. Photo: Andrew Pertsev / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

How the assembly line learned to drive screws

For centuries a screw was turned by hand with a flat blade in a single slot. The earliest written record of a screwdriver comes from the Housebook of Wolfegg Castle, a German manuscript from the late 1400s. Slotted screws are cheap to make but awkward in a factory: the blade slips out of the slot, the screw tilts, and the worker has to hold everything straight. Around 1908 the Canadian inventor P. L. Robertson brought out screws with a square socket that held the driver in place, and they are still common in Canada. Making screws that a driver could find and grip was the first step toward speeding up the job.

A Robertson screw with its square socket, which keeps the driver from slipping. Photo: Saforrest / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

The Phillips cross head, patented in the United States in the 1930s, was designed for powered drivers on moving lines. The driver centres itself in the recess, so a worker can drive screws quickly with one hand. Cadillac was among the first carmakers to use Phillips screws on its assembly line, in 1936. During the Second World War, factories converted to war work used electric screwdrivers on long benches of parts. A 1942 photo series from a Chicago piano factory shows women assembling aircraft motor parts this way. Air and electric drivers with torque clutches then spread through car and appliance plants.

Former piano workers in Chicago assemble aircraft motor parts with an electric screwdriver, July 1942. Photo: Ann Rosener / Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The next step took the hand off the tool. Fixed screwdriving stations with a spindle, a screw feeder and a torque controller were built into special machines for one product at a time. The real change came with the SCARA arm, developed in 1978 by Hiroshi Makino at the University of Yamanashi in Japan. A SCARA is stiff in the vertical direction and quick in the horizontal plane, which is exactly what driving a screw straight down needs. SCARA robots spread through Japanese electronics assembly in the early 1980s, and fitted with a screw feeder and driver they are still a common sight.

A Hirata SCARA robot in an assembly cell with a tray stacker. Photo: Hirata Robotics GmbH / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE)

Smart screwdrivers on YuMi and GoFa

Screwdriving suppliers are still expanding. In late September 2026 the German screwdriving specialist DEPRAG set up DEPRAG India and said it would start local assembly of selected systems within four to six months, serving carmakers, electronics firms and electric mobility. The hard parts of the job have not changed. The bit has to seat fully in the recess or it cams out and damages the head, screws have to arrive one at a time in the right orientation, and every joint needs to reach the right torque at the right angle. A good automated cell checks all of that on every screw.

Phillips and JIS cross point bits side by side; a bit that does not match the recess cams out. Photo: Elop / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

ABB has used its own dual arm YuMi IRB 14000 for this inside its drives business. In an ABB case study, YuMi's left arm carries an Atlas Copco MicroTorque smart screwdriver and loosens 27 screws to release a test plate, with the whole sequence taking about two and a half minutes, close to the time of the old manual process. The screwdriver senses force and torque, so the robot knows when each screw has turned enough. YuMi's camera finds each screw head precisely, which removed the need for the second arm to hold a guide. The worker who used to do the job moved to other work on the line.

ABB's dual arm YuMi IRB 14000, the robot ABB used for its own screwdriving cell, here working beside a lab technician. Photo: ABB

For larger parts ABB's GoFa CRB 15000, launched in 2021 alongside the faster SWIFTI CRB 1100, carries up to 5 kg and can work next to people because it limits its speed and force. ABB lists screwdriving among GoFa's applications, and tool makers such as OnRobot sell screwdriver packages that fit it. A typical cell has the cobot take a screw from a feeder, find the hole with a camera and drive the screw while the controller logs torque and angle. Engineers usually test the reach and cycle time first in RobotStudio, and ABB's Wizard easy programming lets operators change a screw pattern without writing code.

An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 cobot being guided by hand at an assembly table. Photo: ABB

Where screwdriving robots go from here

The next wave of screwdriving will be shaped by how fast products change. Electronics, e-bikes and home appliances now come in many variants, and a cobot that can be moved and retaught in an afternoon fits that better than a dedicated screwing machine. Humanoid robot makers also want to drive screws, since so much existing assembly is laid out for human hands. That is still hard: a 24/7 Wall St. report on 29 September 2026 said Tesla still could not get the Optimus hands to work well, and a hand has to be very good to hold a screw and a driver at once.

The Shadow Dexterous Hand holding a light bulb; humanoids need hands this capable to handle screws. Photo: Richard Greenhill and Hugo Elias / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Smaller shops are the other growth area. A cobot with a smart screwdriver costs far less than a custom station, and the same arm can screw, test and pack on different days. The problems that remain are practical. Screws still need feeders or presented trays, flexible parts like plastic covers move as the screw goes in, and someone on site has to understand torque curves when a joint fails. ABB's own YuMi has taken on similar fiddly work, as in our post on robots building flat-pack furniture.

An engineer programs an ABB SWIFTI CRB 1100 cobot with a tablet at a small workshop bench. Photo: ABB

Screws may also get used less. Designers increasingly snap, glue or clip parts together to save assembly time, while right to repair rules in Europe push the other way, toward screws that can be undone. Products that people can open again will keep screws, and those screws will still need to be driven to a set torque and recorded. For factories that is a good fit for screwdriving robots that log every joint. For homes, the nearest version is a cobot in a repair shop or a maker space that can take a device apart and put it back together screw by screw.

Volunteers fixing household items at a Repair Café. Photo: Ilvy Njiokiktjien / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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