Smart Meter Manufacturing: From Discs to ABB Robots

Smart meter manufacturing has to turn out tens of millions of small, sealed and exactly calibrated devices, and demand is rising as utilities replace old meters. This post follows the electricity meter from the first induction designs of the 1880s to the sealed electronic units on home walls today. It uses this month's rollout news from India as the hook, since that country is installing meters faster than most, describes how a meter line is assembled and tested, and asks where ABB robots such as the IRB 1200, IRB 1300 and GoFa could fit.

An engraving of Oliver Shallenberger's electricity meter, dated 1888. Photo: Unknown author / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

How electricity meters were built before smart meters

Early electricity meters were hand-built instruments. Oliver Shallenberger's 1888 meter for Westinghouse measured current, not true energy, according to a Hungarian technical history, and one account says more than 120,000 of them sold in ten years. Elihu Thomson in the United States and Ottó Bláthy at the Ganz works in Budapest followed in 1889 with watt-hour meters. The photo shows a later meter from the Ganz meter works in Hungary. The same history says the 1888 meter's accuracy could not have been very good by today's standards.

A meter from the Ganz meter works in Hungary. Photo: 12akd / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The induction meter that came out of this period dominated for a century. The result was simple and durable. A coil pair drove a light aluminium disc, a worm gear turned the dials, and the count of turns became kilowatt hours. Makers such as Landis and Gyr built them for decades, and the photo shows the dial register of a three phase example. Each meter was fitted with its disc, bearings and brake magnet and then adjusted on a test rig until it read correctly.

The dial register of a Landis and Gyr three phase electromechanical meter. Photo: RODALCO / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Electronics changed the work. The 1992 Landis and Gyr meter in the photo still has a disc and a counter behind a window. An electronic meter replaces the disc with a measuring chip and a liquid crystal display, as the 2023 Logarex unit in the next photo shows. It has wire seals to prove nobody has opened it and an optical port for reading the count without opening the case. It has fewer moving parts to adjust, but it adds circuit boards, firmware and communication modules.

A Landis and Gyr electromechanical meter from 1992. Photo: Paebi / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How robots join meter lines now

Smart meters add two way communication to that electronics, and governments are rolling them out at scale. At Metering India 2026 on 8 October, Joint Secretary Shashank Misra said nearly 70 million smart meters had been deployed, according to Energetica India. Under India's Revamped Distribution Sector Scheme, 20.33 crore meters are sanctioned for installation by March 2028. On 24 September the Power Secretary said the government could require India-designed chips in smart meters by mid-2028. IEEMA's president said the metering industry has grown more than 60 percent in three years.

A Logarex electronic meter built in 2023, with an LCD, wire seals and an optical port. Photo: RobbieIanMorrison / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

A modern meter line typically starts with circuit boards made by surface mount machines. Operators or robots then fit the board, display, terminals and cover, a calibration station loads known voltages and currents, and the unit is sealed, labelled and packed. Those stations repeat the same small moves thousands of times per shift. Robots are most useful where parts must be picked from trays, pressed into housings, plugged into a test fixture and moved on, while people handle exceptions, repairs and quality records. Seals and labels also matter, because a meter must show that nobody has tampered with it.

A smart meter gateway with its communication module in a fuse cabinet. Photo: Pichiciago / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB has built lines of this kind for its own electrical equipment. The switchgear assembly line that JOT Automation built for ABB Smart Power in Vaasa, Finland uses robots in cells along a conveyor, and the same layout could handle meter parts. ABB's IRB 1200 and IRB 1300 are compact arms for small parts, and the new IRB 1700, launched on 12 October 2026, adds reach and a payload of 6 to 12 kg. No source says ABB robots build smart meters, so these are possible fits, not reported projects.

The robotic switchgear assembly line JOT Automation built for ABB Smart Power in Vaasa, Finland. Photo: ABB

What comes next for meters and the robots that make them

Testing is the natural next step for cobots. ABB's GoFa has been used at a gas leak and electrical test station on an Electrolux refrigerator line in Curitiba, and a meter calibration bench has similar needs: connect a probe, apply a known load, run a sequence and record the result against a reference. Giving that work to a GoFa could free technicians for repair and audit. Robot programs would be built and checked first in RobotStudio, so a layout can be proven before a fixture is built.

An ABB GoFa cobot at a gas leak and electrical test station on Electrolux's refrigerator line in Curitiba. Photo: ABB

For homes, the biggest open problems are not manufacturing. Misra told the Indian conference that fewer than 20 percent of users download the smart meter app, and he called that a significant gap, adding that promoting its use is no longer optional. Rollouts elsewhere have run into trouble too: a Fitch Solutions note of 9 October 2026 says gaps in Europe's rollout raise grid risks, while a PNM rollout in New Mexico began in September amid billing complaints reported by the Albuquerque Journal. These are reasons customers distrust meters, and they sit outside the factory.

An electricity meter in India, wired to a wall. Photo: GautamSudhanshu / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

For factories, the pressures are cost, local content and flexibility. If India's chip plans go ahead and local suppliers join, board designs will change as local components arrive, and a line that has to take new boards needs robots that can be reprogrammed quickly. ABB's grid hardware is built on lines like these, as the post on power grid switchgear describes, and a related story on electric motor manufacturing covers a similar assembly problem. Cost and skills are the open problems: such a cell needs staff who understand both robot programming and meter testing.

An ABB robot assembling switchgear parts in a cell on the Vaasa line. Photo: ABB

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