Sheet Metal Part Sorting: SortMaster, AI Vision and ABB

A modern fiber laser can cut parts out of a steel sheet in minutes, and then someone has to get those parts out. Sheet metal part sorting means lifting every finished part out of the leftover skeleton and stacking it by order or by the next machine it goes to, and in many shops people still do it by hand. This post covers how fabricators cut and unloaded sheet before automation, the first automatic sorting systems, the AI and robot cells on show around EuroBLECH in October 2026, and where ABB robots could fit.

A Trumpf TruLaser 3530 CO2 laser cutting machine. Photo: S zillayali / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

From hand shears to laser tables and hand unloading

Trumpf began in 1923, when Christian Trumpf bought Julius Geiger's mechanical workshop in Stuttgart, and in 1934 it introduced the first motorized hand shears for cutting sheet metal. Lasers came later. Western Electric used the first production laser cutting machine in 1965 to drill holes in diamond dies, oxygen-assisted laser cutting of metal was pioneered in Britain in 1967, and in the early 1970s the technology went into production for cutting titanium for aerospace. Trumpf introduced its first carbon dioxide laser in 1985.

A tinsmith cuts sheet metal in his workshop in Japan, around 1910, on a hand-tinted glass slide. Photo: University of Victoria Libraries via Wikimedia Commons (no known restrictions)

Laser tables made cutting fast, and unloading stayed slow. Nesting software packs parts into a sheet to waste as little material as possible, so each cut sheet leaves its parts sitting in a scrap skeleton. In heavy fabrication shops, operators often climb onto the table, pull the parts out and carry them to a pallet, or wait for an overhead crane. "Imagine an operator who needs to unload by hand 1,000 parts every day, and they each weigh 25 lbs," said Brando Belloni of Sideros America in October 2026. Standing on the slats of a laser bed also brings a risk of falling.

A cut sheet full of round cut-outs on the shuttle table of a Hankwang laser cutting machine at the MZKT plant in Minsk, 2019. Photo: Homoatrox / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Automatic sorting systems arrived, but Trumpf itself says conventional methods suit simple parts in sheets up to 12 millimetres thick. At EuroBLECH in October 2024 it showed a different approach. Its SortMaster Station takes the cut sheet from the laser's pallet changer and separates the parts from the skeleton in a few seconds, whatever their shape, while the laser cuts the next sheet. SortMaster Vision then uses a camera and AI image recognition, with software from Alphabet's Intrinsic, to find each part, plan the robot's grip from the cutting program and stack the parts. "The automated sorting of parts is one of the biggest challenges in the sheet metal world," said Trumpf's Thomas Schneider.

Bystronic's stand at EuroBLECH 2006 with laser cutting and material handling systems. Photo: Bystronic / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5)

Sheet metal part sorting robots at EuroBLECH 2026

By October 2026 the system was at work in factories: on 6 October the International Federation of Robotics described SortMaster Vision as deployed by sheet metal manufacturers across Germany. A Fanuc R-2000iC/210L robot does the lifting, guided by the Intrinsic Vision Model, a deep learning model trained from CAD data that estimates each part's position from ordinary RGB camera images with sub-millimetre accuracy. Starmatik, a sheet metal integrator, designed the grippers. Trumpf says SortMaster Vision sorts parts from sheets up to 25 mm thick without programming, which matters for small batches.

Laser cutting lines in the MZKT plant in Minsk, seen at an open day in 2019. Photo: Homoatrox / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

On 28 August 2026 Bystronic agreed to buy Isochronic, a Swiss company founded in 2020 near Lausanne that builds pick-and-place robots for handling and sorting, to extend its automated sorting to more sheet formats. At EuroBLECH 2026 in Hanover, Trumpf showed for the first time an AI-supported system for small parts, whose cameras find each part so a robot can pick it without programming. Not every shop wants this kind of system, though. On 17 October 2026 The Fabricator noted that sorting systems are expensive, take a lot of room and work best with thinner parts, and showed a pneumatic manipulator for heavy plate at Belloni Lamiere in Piacenza.

An LVD laser cutting machine in the MZKT plant in Minsk, 2019. Photo: Homoatrox / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

None of the sources for this post shows an ABB robot in a laser sorting cell, so ABB's role is a possibility. The pieces are in its range. On 12 October 2026 ABB added an AI Robot Trainer to OmniCore EyeMotion, its vision system for jobs from 2D pick and place to 3D bin picking, inspection and sorting, which works with any brand of camera and, with automatic collision-free path planning, cuts commissioning time by up to 90%. For heavy plate parts, the IRB 6710 to IRB 6740 family carries 150 to 310 kg with 2.5 to 3.2 m of reach, and the IRB 7710 and IRB 7720 carry up to 620 kg.

ABB IRB 6740 robots with vacuum grippers stacking transformer core laminations at Sieyuan Toshiba in Changzhou, China. Photo: ABB

Where sheet metal part sorting goes next

Sorting is starting to connect to the machines after it. In Trumpf's 2026 punching demo, punched parts travel on a buffer belt to a TruBend Center bending cell, and finished components can go back to storage or be handed to a mobile robot. Separating cutting from sorting also lets the laser keep cutting while the last sheet is sorted. ABB robots already feed press brakes, as our post on robotic press brake cells describes, and ABB's Flexley AMRs move loads between machines without fixed tracks, so a cell that cuts, sorts, bends and transports could plausibly be built around them.

An orange ABB robot in Foundry finish holds a sheet at a Trumpf TrumaBend V230 press brake, 2005. Photo: Borowski / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

For factories, the goal is sorting that needs no programming and copes with small batches, which is how Trumpf describes its newest systems. Thick parts and very small parts are the two ends still being worked on: SortMaster Vision reaches 25 mm, and the 2026 demo targeted small parts. For homes the change is indirect, through the cost and lead time of sheet metal parts in household products such as washing machines. An ABB based cell of this kind could be planned and tested first in RobotStudio, which runs robot programs on a virtual copy of the cell.

An engineer checks a planned pick in ABB's OmniCore EyeMotion software, with an ABB cobot behind the screen, 2026. Photo: ABB

Cost and floor space remain the main brakes, as The Fabricator pointed out, and a sorting cell that pays off for thin sheet may sit idle in a heavy plate shop. Safety is the other driver. Belloni's point about operators climbing onto laser slats and lifting 1,000 parts a day is why his family's own shop now runs three pneumatic manipulators, one at the laser and two at press brakes. Skills will shift as well. Systems that sort without programming should move the work from writing robot paths toward checking what the camera saw, keeping grippers in shape and deciding which jobs to send to the cell.

US Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh talks with instructor Bobby Wade about a laser cutting machine at Kirkwood Community College, Iowa, 2021. Photo: US Department of Labor / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

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