Tire Manufacturing Robot: ABB Arms From Drum to Press

A car tire looks like one piece of rubber, but it starts as a stack of separate layers: inner liner, fabric plies, steel belts, beads and tread. Those layers have to be put together, and then the soft, sticky result has to be carried to a hot press. This post follows the tire manufacturing robot through that job. It starts with the hand builders of Akron, moves to Pirelli's robotized MIRS cells, covers this autumn's big plant investments and where ABB robots fit in, and ends with the problems that still keep people on the tire floor.

Finished tires stacked in tall racks inside a tire factory. Photo: Hixihtire / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How tires were built by hand in Akron and Chicopee

John Boyd Dunlop patented his pneumatic tire in 1888, and within a few decades Akron, Ohio, was known as the rubber capital of the world, with Goodyear, Goodrich and Firestone all building tires there. A tire builder stood at a rotating drum and laid strips of rubberized fabric onto it one ply at a time. He pressed each layer down with hand rollers, set the beads and wrapped the tread on top. The material was heavy, and the builders' speed decided how many tires the whole line turned out.

Workers at a rubber machine in the Goodyear plant in Akron, Ohio, making tires for the US government around 1918. Photo: U.S. National Archives via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

What came off the drum was a green tire, the industry's name for a tire that has been built but not yet cured. In 1920 photos from the Fisk Tire Company in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, workers lift green tires into metal molds by hand and stack the molds into large vulcanizers, where steam heat turned the soft rubber into a finished, elastic tire. Between the building drum and the heater, almost all of the work was lifting and carrying.

Workers placing unvulcanized green tires into molds at the Fisk Tire Company, 1920. Photo: Edward Bellamy Memorial Association, Digital Commonwealth via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Machines took over the job piece by piece. Building drums got motors, and curing moved into individual presses with an inflatable bladder inside the tire. McNeil of Akron filed its Bag-O-Matic trademark for these presses in 1950. The first plant where robots ran the whole sequence arrived in July 2000, when Pirelli showed MIRS, its Modular Integrated Robotized System, in Milan. Robots carried each tire from building to curing without a person touching it, and Pirelli said MIRS cut the number of process steps from 14 to three. MIRS lines later ran at Pirelli plants in Burton-on-Trent in England, Breuberg in Germany and Rome, Georgia.

Filling a vulcanizer with tire molds at the Fisk Tire Company, 1920. Photo: Edward Bellamy Memorial Association, Digital Commonwealth via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Pirelli's Georgia bet and robots at the curing press

Tire makers are spending on automation again. On 22 September 2026 Pirelli's board approved a US plan of about €1 billion, or roughly $1.2 billion, for its plant in Rome, Georgia, where it opened its first American MIRS factory in 2002. The plan adds around 1,000 jobs in two phases, and the robotic equipment goes in first. Most of the hiring is expected from 2029, with full operation planned for 2033. A week later Hyundai Movex won a 72 billion won contract to automate material flow at Kumho Tire's new Hampyeong plant in Korea, linking storage, conveyors and mobile robots by October 2028. The plant is planned for 5.3 million tires a year, and the system will track material from raw inputs to finished tires in automated storage.

A large modern tire factory seen from the air. Photo: Hixihtire / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Inspection is changing too. On 24 September Rockwell Automation, Tekna and Prometeon described a camera system that checks finished truck and bus tires for defects, a job many lines still do by eye. The system detects and classifies anomalies, and the partners say it also gives the plant a clearer view of how production is running. Most robots in a tire plant, though, are there to lift. Green tires are soft and easy to dent, so loaders grip them carefully at the bead and set each one into the curing press. At the end of the line, robots stack finished tires onto pallets or into racks.

An ABB IRB 660 palletizer, the type of robot that could stack finished tires at the end of a line. Photo: ABB

So far ABB's link to the industry is mostly mobile robots. In January 2024, when ABB bought Sevensense, it named Michelin as one of the companies piloting its Visual SLAM navigation, at a factory in Spain. That navigation now guides ABB's Flexley Mover AMRs. ABB arms could take on the heavy jobs as well, though this is a possibility and not a reported project: an IRB 6700 or IRB 5710 loading green tires into presses, or an IRB 660 palletizing finished tires. Cells like these are usually laid out and tested first in RobotStudio.

An ABB Flexley Mover P603 carrying crates. Photo: ABB

Where the tire manufacturing robot goes next

Most of the near-term change will be in moving tires between machines. Continental has run seven autonomous mobile robots carrying green tires at its ContiLifeCycle plant in Hanover-Stöcken since March 2025, and the Kumho contract applies the same idea to a whole plant. The next step is to link those vehicles with the arms at the presses so a tire travels from drum to warehouse without a forklift. Once the tire leaves the factory, robots are starting to handle it again at the tire shop.

Continental's tire factory in Hanover-Stöcken, Germany, home of its ContiLifeCycle plant. Photo: Christian A. Schröder (ChristianSchd) / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

For drivers, the effect is mostly indirect. Robot-built lines make it cheaper to run many sizes in small batches, and EVs bring heavier, larger tires in more sizes. Pirelli designed MIRS for high-performance tires in fairly low volumes for that reason. Better automated inspection should also mean fewer faulty tires leaving the plant, although tire makers do not publish defect rates.

Engineers with an ABB IRB 5710, a large robot for heavy handling. Photo: ABB

Some problems are still hard. Green tires change shape when gripped, and truck and mining tires weigh far more than a cobot can carry, so those lines still rely on cranes and skilled operators. Older plants were laid out around people and forklifts and are expensive to rebuild. Pirelli's own plan shows how the work is split: robots go in during the first phase, and most of the hiring comes in the second. The people hired will spend more of their time running and fixing machines than building tires by hand.

Large used earthmover tires at a former limestone quarry on Gotland, Sweden. Photo: W.carter / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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