Toy Manufacturing Robot: From Tin Toys to ABB Arms

Every holiday season the toy business runs flat out, and a growing share of the work is done by machines. A toy manufacturing robot today might pull fresh parts out of a moulding press, carry bins of bricks across a plant or stack boxes in a warehouse no person walks through. This post follows the trade from hand-assembled tin toys in 19th century Germany, through the plastic brick LEGO patented in 1958, to the robot-heavy plants behind this year's shelves. It also looks at where ABB robots could fit and what still holds toy makers back from automating more.

The LEGO Group's factory in Kladno, Czech Republic, one of the company's toy plants, seen from the northeast in 2008. Photo: Miaow Miaow / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

How tin toys and plastic bricks were made by hand

Tinplate toys appeared in the middle of the 19th century, and spring-driven tin toys came out of Germany in the 1850s. Workshops cut thin tin-plated steel, bent it into shape and painted it by hand. Two inventions sped things up. Sheet metal stamping machines, first built around 1815, let a die form the same part again and again. From the late 1880s, offset lithography printed the colours onto flat sheets before they were shaped. German firms such as Ernst Paul Lehmann's exported most of what they made.

A lithographed tinplate clockwork car with a doll passenger, made between 1900 and 1920. Photo: unknown author via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Even with presses and printing, a tin toy was still put together by people. Workers bent tabs, fitted clockwork motors, added wheels and packed each piece. After the First World War, American makers expanded, and Louis Marx and Company became the biggest of them from the 1920s to the 1960s by selling in huge volumes. Japan became a major producer by the late 1950s, after the postwar occupation let its factories restart. Then, in the 1960s, cheaper plastic toys and new safety rules pushed tin aside.

Girls dressing dolls in a British toy factory, probably in the Midlands, in 1917. Photo: George P. Lewis, Imperial War Museum via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

LEGO shows the switch from wood to plastic in one company. Ole Kirk Christiansen started making wooden toys in Billund, Denmark, in 1932. The firm bought its first injection moulding machine in 1947. In 1949 it sold Automatic Binding Bricks, based on Hilary Page's Kiddicraft self-locking bricks, which had been patented in 1940. The modern LEGO brick followed with a patent application filed on 28 January 1958, and in 1963 the material changed from cellulose acetate to ABS. From then on, one steel mould could turn out the same part thousands of times.

The first patented LEGO bricks from 1958, on display at Danmarks Tekniske Museum in Helsingør. Photo: Leif Jørgensen / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Robots on the floor of modern toy plants

Toy makers are still adding capacity. On 24 September 2026 the LEGO Group announced it would invest more than US $400 million in its factory in Monterrey, Mexico, already its largest plant with 7,300 employees. The 62,000 square metre expansion adds a new packing hall with a fully automated high-bay warehouse, raises production capacity by 35 percent and should create 1,300 jobs by 2029. The site moulds elements, decorates them and packs boxes, and LEGO says its parts are moulded to within 5 micrometres. On the retail side, Toys "R" Us said in September it would open 120 new standalone stores in the United States for the holiday season.

The LEGO factory near Kladno seen from the Kožová hora lookout tower in 2017. Photo: Aktron / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Robots already do much of the carrying inside such plants. A 2016 report on LEGO's Billund factory described machines turning out about 36,000 pieces a minute, with eight robots moving roughly 600 bins of elements an hour and crane systems stacking boxes in storage towers with no people inside. Silos feed the presses with about 60 tonnes of ABS granules every 24 hours, and a part cools in the mould for around 7 seconds. Optical sensors count pieces during packing, and precise scales flag any box with the wrong weight. LEGO's site in Kladno, Czech Republic, has a high-bay warehouse with room for about 360,000 storage boxes of elements.

An injection moulding machine with a robot arm that places finished parts on a conveyor. Photo: The robotic engineer1 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

I found no public source showing ABB robots on LEGO's lines, so what follows is a possibility. ABB arms already unload injection moulding machines in other plastics plants, for example an IRB 4400 working at an ENGEL press in Spain, as covered in our post on robots in injection molding. The Swedish moulder AD Plast runs 14 ABB robots, each at the centre of its own cell with a moulding machine and quality checks. In a toy plant an IRB 1300 could tend presses, IRB 360 FlexPicker delta robots with PickMaster could drop small parts into bags, a YuMi could assemble small figures and IRB 460 palletizers could stack shipping cartons.

An ABB IRB 4400 unloads parts from an ENGEL injection moulding machine in a Spanish plant. Photo: ABB

Where toy making goes next

Toy demand is seasonal and product ranges change every year, so toy makers need automation they can retool quickly. A new set or figure can mean new grippers, new trays and new robot paths within weeks. Engineers usually build and test such cells first in RobotStudio, checking reach and cycle time on a virtual copy before any hardware moves. Collaborative robots such as GoFa, which work beside people without full fencing, suit short runs where an operator swaps parts often.

An ABB GoFa cobot loading parts into a machine at a small factory. Photo: ABB

Homes are changing the products as well. More toys now carry motors, sensors and chips, and AI toys and small robot pets have become a market of their own; in August 2026 Global News reported on a robot called Microduck entering that growing market. That means toy factories increasingly handle circuit boards, batteries and screens alongside plastic parts, which is closer to electronics assembly. Robots that place small parts precisely, such as the single-arm YuMi IRB 14050, are the kind of machine that work calls for.

ABB YuMi assembling small parts beside a lab worker. Photo: ABB

Cost is the biggest open problem. A robot cell pays off on long runs, but many toys sell for a single season, and smaller makers cannot spread the cost over billions of parts as LEGO can. Safety matters too: robots near people need speed and zone limits, which ABB handles with SafeMove. Then there are skills. LEGO's Monterrey general manager, Nancy Sánchez, said the expansion will bring more technical training. Automated plants still need people who can run and fix the machines.

ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker robots packing small items at high speed. Photo: ABB

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