Robotic Shot Peening: ABB Robots in the Blast Cell

Look closely at an aircraft landing gear leg, a turbine disc or a gear wheel and you may see that its surface is covered in tiny dents, put there on purpose. Shot peening fires small steel or ceramic balls at a part so the surface layer is squeezed into compression, which makes fatigue cracks much harder to start. Sand and grit blasting use a similar stream to clean or roughen metal before coating. Robotic shot peening moves the nozzle, or the part, with an industrial robot so every square centimetre gets the same treatment. This post covers how blasting was done by hand, how peening grew out of it, and where ABB robots work in blast cells today.

Aircraft landing gear assemblies in a repair and overhaul shop. Landing gear parts are among those shot peened. Photo: Tigerlily242 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From hand-held sand hoses to the Almen strip

Abrasive blasting is older than the car. On 18 October 1870 the American inventor Benjamin Chew Tilghman received US patent 108,408 for cutting and engraving stone, metal and glass with a jet of sand. In 1904 Thomas Wesley Pangborn added compressed air to the method, and blasting spread to foundries, shipyards and stonemasons. For decades the work meant a person in a hood holding a heavy hose, aiming the stream at a casting or a wall by eye. The dust was the worst part. Fine silica from the sand caused silicosis, a lung disease that killed many blasters.

A sand blaster in a hood and protective suit at work, around 1915 to 1920. Photo: Bain News Service, Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

In 1918 the first blasting enclosure was built: it kept the worker behind a viewing screen, turned around the workpiece and used an exhaust fan to pull dust away. In 1932 Wheelabrator patented the blast wheel, which throws abrasive with a spinning wheel instead of air, so parts could tumble through a machine with nobody holding a nozzle. Over the following decades Britain, Germany, Sweden and several other countries banned silica sand for blasting. Airless wheels and closed cabinets became normal in factories, while big structures such as ships and bridges were still blasted by hand.

Workers in hoods sandblast airplane engine parts at the Packard Motor Car Co. in Detroit, 1918. Photo: National Archives via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Shot peening came out of a lucky accident at General Motors. Engine valve springs kept failing on GM's test rigs, and springs that had been cleaned in a Wheelabrator tumble blast machine turned out to last much longer. GM engineer John O. Almen studied the effect and in 1942 filed a patent for a test strip and gauge that measure how hard a part has been peened. The Almen strip is still the industry yardstick, written into the SAE J442 standard. By the 1950s aircraft laboratories, such as the US Navy's Aeronautical Materials Laboratory, ran Pangborn peening machines to make highly loaded parts last longer.

An engineer runs a Pangborn shot peening machine at the US Naval Air Material Center's Aeronautical Materials Laboratory, around 1958. Photo: Naval Air Material Center via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Robots inside today's blast cabinets

Hand work has not disappeared. Large castings, ship hulls and repairs are still blasted by people in air-fed suits, and peening of aircraft parts is often done by specialist service shops. One of them, Curtiss-Wright Surface Technologies, said on 10 September 2026 that it is expanding its shot peening facility in Bangalore, India, adding plasma, HVOF and flame thermal spray, materials testing and engineering support for aerospace, defence, power generation and automotive customers. Peening and coating often happen on the same parts, and aerospace work runs to strict specifications such as AMS2432, which calls for computer monitored peening.

A worker sandblasts in full protective gear with an air supplied hood. Photo: NIOSH via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Robots suit this work because of those specifications. A peening spec fixes the shot size, air pressure, nozzle distance, angle and time on every zone of the part, and a robot repeats all of them exactly and logs the run. The British blast equipment maker Guyson has built several such cells with ABB robots. In one from 2017, an ABB Foundry Plus robot holds a boron carbide nozzle inside a blast cabinet and prepares aerospace seal rings and turbine blade tips for plasma spraying, with a turntable as a seventh axis. In another from 2020, an ABB robot carries parts between a steel shot peening machine and a glass bead peening machine.

ABB robots with Foundry protection working in a sand core cell, the same sealed robot family used in blast cabinets. Photo: ABB

Blast cabinets are hard on machines, so the robot needs protection. ABB's Foundry Plus versions seal the whole robot to IP67, use two-component epoxy paint against corrosion and add extra sealing for cables and electronics, so abrasive dust and water stay out. ABB offers this protection on arms such as the small IRB 1300 and the larger IRB 4600 and IRB 6700. A turntable or track becomes an external axis that the robot controller moves in step with the arm. Nozzle paths for curved parts are usually built and checked first in RobotStudio, so the shot hits each zone at the right angle.

An ABB IRB 1300 with Foundry Plus 2 protection, built to handle water and dust. Photo: ABB

Where robotic peening and blasting go next

Factories are asking robots to do more of the surface work around peening. Grinding, deburring, grit blasting before coating, peening, washing and inspection are steps that used to happen in different rooms with people carrying parts between them. Linking them in one robot cell cuts handling and makes the record of each part complete, which aerospace and medical customers want. Vision and laser scanning can measure the actual part before blasting so the path adapts to small differences between castings. ABB's foundry brochures already list grinding, fettling, washing and blasting as jobs for its protected robots, so one family of arms can cover several of these steps.

An ABB IRB 6700 grinding a steel part in Teqram's EasyGrinder cell at Ancofer, another surface finishing job for robots. Photo: ABB

Safety remains the strongest argument for taking people out of the blast. Even with air-fed hoods and safer abrasives, manual blasting is noisy, dusty and tiring, and repairs on bridges, tanks and hulls still expose workers. Shipyards are where this is moving fastest. In April 2026 RobotPlusPlus delivered more than 20 hydroblasting robots to the NOSCO shipyard in Quang Ninh, Vietnam, replacing manual blasting of hulls with ultra high pressure water jets, and it showed its HighMate series at the SMM fair in September. ABB has not announced a mobile blasting robot, so putting its arms on such platforms for field work is only a possibility for now.

A new sand blasting helmet meant to protect workers from silicosis is shown in Washington, D.C., in 1936. Photo: Harris & Ewing, Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The hard parts are cost, process knowledge and skills. A sealed robot cell with media recycling and dust collection is a large purchase for a small job shop, and peening specs require qualification before a new cell can process flight parts. Shot wears the nozzle, hoses and robot covers, so maintenance is constant. Programmers need to understand both the robot and the peening process, including Almen intensity and coverage. That is why programming in RobotStudio and simulating paths before the first run saves time, and why people who know peening will still be needed as more of the blasting moves inside closed robot cells.

An ABB robot seen between the open halves of a die casting die. ABB builds protected Foundry versions of its robots for wet, dirty cells. Photo: ABB

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