Tablet Manufacturing Robot: From Pill Rollers to ABB

A tablet manufacturing robot takes over the handling jobs around the press: moving powder, carrying samples to the testers and shifting batches through the plant. Tablets are worth the effort, since about two thirds of all prescriptions are dispensed as solid doses and half of those are compressed tablets. This post starts with pills rolled by hand and the first tablet machines, then turns to this autumn's news on continuous tableting and to where ABB robots could fit. Packing the finished tablets is a separate job, covered in our post on blister packing robots.

Freshly pressed tablets leave the die table of a rotary press at the pharmaceutical institute of the University of Tübingen, 2018. Photo: Robin Müller / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

From hand-rolled pills to the rotary press

Pills are thought to date back to around 1500 BC. Egyptian recipes mixed plant powders or spices into bread dough, honey or grease, and the mixture was formed by hand into little balls. The Roman scholar Pliny gave them the name pilula. The word still describes the old method: grind the ingredients with a mortar and pestle, roll the paste into lumps and let them dry. Pharmacies later used pill machines. One made by S Maw and Son of London, which came from Horsley's Pharmacy in Auckland, is a wooden and brass tray with grooves and a handle for rolling and separating pills.

A pill machine by S Maw and Son of London from Horsley's Pharmacy in Auckland, a grooved tray and handle for rolling and separating pills. Photo: Auckland Museum via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Compression came next. In 1843 the British painter and inventor William Brockedon was granted a patent for a machine for "Shaping Pills, Lozenges, and Black Lead by Pressure in Dies", which pressed powder into a tablet without any adhesive. In 1872 Henry Bower, an employee of Wyeth, developed one of the first rotary compressed tablet machines in the United States, and medicines could then be mass produced with new precision and speed. In a press, powder fills a die between two punches, the punches squeeze it into a hard tablet, and the lower punch pushes it out. Rotary presses carry many punches on a turret, with cams moving them up and down.

A hand tablet press with a wooden mallet in the drug making history exhibition at Kuks Hospital, Czech Republic. Photo: Jiří Sedláček / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Factories scaled this up, but people did the handling. In 1945, at a factory near London making the antimalarial mepacrine, Ministry of Information photographers showed workers mixing a wet paste, feeding a granulator, pushing trays into drying ovens and collecting tablet samples from the machine for testing. Hardness testers such as the Monsanto tester of 1930 and the Pfizer tester of 1950 turned those checks into numbers. A modern press can make from 250,000 to over 1,700,000 tablets an hour, so weight, thickness and hardness are checked often, with automated testers next to the press or in the in-process control lab.

A boy collects a sample of mepacrine tablets for testing from the machine that makes them, at a factory near London in 1945. Photo: Ministry of Information / Imperial War Museums via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Continuous lines and robots in tablet plants today

This autumn's tablet news was about continuous tableting. On 5 October the contract manufacturer Hovione said it will commission the world's first ConsiGma CDC Flex, a continuous direct compression line developed with GEA, at East Windsor, New Jersey, in late 2027 after a $35 million investment. The line can run in continuous or batch mode at 1 to 200 kg an hour, formulation work can start with 1.5 kg of material, and containment to 1 µg/m³ allows highly potent drugs. Inline process analytical technology and automated controls check quality in real time. Hovione already makes tablets on ConsiGma equipment at Loures in Portugal.

A rotary tablet press in operation at the pharmaceutical institute of the University of Tübingen, 2018. Photo: Robin Müller / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Robots are spreading more slowly. In PharmTech last December, John Nadzam of Thermo Fisher Scientific said oral solid dose makers have been slower to automate than biologics producers, and that many batch plants still rely on paper records and manual signatures. His colleague Doug Hausner pointed to tablet presses that take feedback from in-line hardness and weight testers to cut rejects and downtime. The article lists robotic presses and feeders for tableting and encapsulation, near-infrared and Raman monitoring, and mobile robots and robotic picking in warehouses and packaging. It also says robotics can keep production rates steady while reducing manual handling.

An FDA scientist drops a tablet into a dissolution tester to measure how long it takes to dissolve, 2013. Photo: Michael J. Ermarth / U.S. FDA via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Some of the parts already exist at ABB. Its IRB 1300 comes in an ISO 4 cleanroom version that ABB aims at industries such as pharmaceuticals. The paint resists cleaning agents, the design leaves few gaps where bacteria could collect, and a particle filter and sealed body keep grease, oil and particles away from the product. ABB lists materials handling, machine tending, and assembly and testing among its jobs. ABB's mobile robot unit has also worked with GSK, using laser guided forklift AMRs to carry raw materials to production lines and finished products to the warehouse. We found no ABB arm tending a tablet press yet, so that part is a possibility.

An ABB IRB 1300 in cleanroom version works with a vacuum gripper inside a production cell. Photo: ABB

Where tablet robots are heading

Development labs show what a robot cell around a press could look like. In April 2026 researchers at the University of Strathclyde's CMAC centre described a self-driving tableting data factory in Nature Communications. One robot arm handles near-infrared scans and carries each dose of powder from a dosing unit to a Medelpharm compaction simulator, whose door was replaced by a laser curtain so the arm can reach the die. A second arm moves the tablets, which a SOTAX tester checks for breaking force, weight, diameter and thickness, and Bayesian optimisation picks the next settings. The team cut the time to in-specification tablets to 6 hours and used 65% less active ingredient than current methods.

Two ABB IRB 1300 robots in cleanroom version working side by side in a laboratory in Halle, Germany. Photo: ABB

The arms in that study reach 850 and 820 mm and carry 5 and 14 kg. That is the same size class as the 11 kg, 900 mm version of the IRB 1300, so an ABB arm could in principle do this kind of tending, though nobody has shown it yet. In plants, continuous lines such as Hovione's are built to remove the scale-up step, because the same equipment serves early development and commercial supply. Smaller and more frequent runs mean more powder containers, samples and tools moving between machines, which is the kind of carrying that ABB's forklift AMRs already do for GSK.

ABB's Flexley Stack F712 autonomous forklift lifting a pallet of boxes toward a rack. Photo: ABB

Cost and skills are the main brakes. Hausner named the high upfront investment and the need for skills development as the two biggest challenges, and noted that outsourcing the work can add time and cost. The article adds that the upfront cost weighs most on small-volume products such as rare disease drugs, and that operators need training in data analysis and troubleshooting. Presses have to be easy to clean and quick to change between products, and a robot working beside them would face the same cleaning and containment demands. A cell like this can be laid out and checked in RobotStudio before it is built.

An operator programs an ABB IRB 1300 robot with the FlexPendant. Photo: ABB

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