Robotic Waterjet Cutting: ABB Arms From Paper to Plates

Robotic waterjet cutting puts a nozzle on a robot arm and cuts with a thin stream of water at very high pressure, sometimes mixed with abrasive grit. In car plants the robots trim carpets, headliners and dashboards. Aircraft makers use abrasive jets on composite parts, and meat plants cut chicken fillets to weight with waterjets. This post traces the method from hydraulic mining and paper mills to the first commercial waterjet in 1971 and the first robot cells. Then it looks at this autumn's machine news, the ABB robots that now carry waterjet heads, and what still makes the process hard.

A CNC waterjet cutting shapes out of a metal sheet. Photo: Steve Brown Photography / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

From hydraulic mining to the first waterjet robots

Before waterjets, soft materials were cut with knives, saws and steel-rule dies, and every new shape needed a new die. Water was already known as a cutting force, though. Gold miners in California in the mid-1800s washed whole hillsides away with high-pressure hoses, a method called hydraulic mining. Factories used water far more gently at first. In 1933 the Paper Patents Company in Wisconsin built a paper metering, cutting and reeling machine that cut a moving sheet with a diagonally moving waterjet nozzle. It ran at low pressure, so it could only cut soft materials like paper.

Hydraulic mining in an open pit in California, around 1880 to 1900. Photo: California Historical Society via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Higher pressure came over the following decades. In 1958 Billie Schwacha at North American Aviation used a pump of about 100,000 psi to cut hard alloys and honeycomb laminate for the XB-70 bomber, although the laminate delaminated at high speed. Norman Franz, who was looking for a new way to cut lumber, built the first waterjet cutting machine in 1965, financed and made by McCartney Manufacturing of Baxter Springs, Kansas. In 1971 McCartney-Ingersoll Rand installed the first commercial waterjet system at the Alton Box Board Company to cut cardboard. Two years later John Olsen at Flow Industries in Kent, Washington, developed the high-pressure intensifier pump that made waterjets practical in factories.

A Jet Edge intensifier pump rated at 90,000 psi, the kind of pump that feeds a waterjet nozzle. Photo: Waterjetter09 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Metal came next. In 1980 Mohamed Hashish at Flow added abrasive to the stream, and the abrasive waterjet could cut steel, stone and composites. In 1987 Ingersoll-Rand Waterjet Systems sold a five-axis pure water system called the Robotic Waterjet System, which despite its name was an overhead gantry. Robot arms arrived around the same time. Since the late 1980s six-axis robots with abrasive jets have trimmed composite aircraft parts, and robots with pure water jets trim car carpets, headliners and instrument panels. TECHNI Waterjet, founded in 1989 in Campbellfield, Australia, started out building robotic waterjet cells for that automotive work.

A Convair employee operates a waterjet cutting machine, from the company's archive of negatives. Photo: San Diego Air and Space Museum Archives via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Waterjet cutting in 2026: gantries, robots and chicken

Most of this autumn's waterjet news is about gantry machines. At IMTS in Chicago, held from 14 to 19 September 2026, OMAX gave the MAXIEM 1530X its IMTS debut, with a VersaJET five-axis head that tilts from 0 to 60 degrees to cut bevels and angled edges. Flow plans to bring its NX Pro and Mach 150 waterjets to FABTECH in Las Vegas from 21 to 23 October, next to a press brake paired with an assistive robot arm. A September 2026 guide in The Fabricator on keeping abrasive waterjets running covers consumable wear, piercing, abrasive flow, water quality and process monitoring.

A large OMAX abrasive waterjet at a Westinghouse plant in Newington, New Hampshire, 2017. Photo: Morrowrj / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Three-dimensional parts are where arms beat gantries, and several integrators build those cells around ABB robots. The US integrator Alliance Automation combines ABB six-axis arms with abrasive waterjets to cut domes, pipes, castings, stamped panels and weldments. The Chinese maker Win-Win Waterjet sells cells with two ceiling-mounted ABB IRB 2600 robots over a rotating table for car interior parts, plus floor-mounted IRB 4600 cells for carpets, headliners and instrument panels. The IRB 2600 carries up to 20 kg with a reach of up to 1.85 m, and ABB lists IP67 protection as standard, which matters in a cell full of spray.

An ABB IRB 2600 handling face mask parts in a production cell. Photo: ABB

Food plants took the same idea in a different direction. JBT, now JBT Marel, has made DSI waterjet portioners for more than 30 years. Each piece of chicken breast, steak or fish is scanned as it enters the machine, and the software steers high-speed waterjet cutting heads to cut fillets, strips or nuggets that hit target weights and shapes. Robots usually work just after the cutter. ABB's delta robots pick and pack the portions; on a Brazilian meat line built by Torfresma, IRB 390 FlexPacker robots pick both light and heavy products. Our post on meat and poultry processing covers that end of the line.

An ABB IRB 390 FlexPacker picking packs of sausages on a Brazilian meat line built by Torfresma. Photo: ABB

Where robotic waterjet cutting goes next

The next few years will probably mix the two machine types more. Five-axis gantries like those from OMAX and Flow keep getting better at bevels on flat plate, while robots keep the work on curved and molded parts where fixtures change with every model. Robots are also moving in around the cutting table: Flow's FABTECH booth pairs a press brake with an assistive robot arm, and arms like that can load sheets and unload cut parts. Waterjets cut cold, so they leave no heat damage in carbon fibre, which ties this application to our post on faster carbon fibre composites.

A five-axis waterjet head cutting steel plate. Photo: WARDJet / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

A waterjet cell is hard on a robot. Mist, wet abrasive and cleaning chemicals get into joints, cables and seals. ABB dealt with this first in waterjet cleaning. Its 2008 Foundry Prime leaflet describes robots for high-pressure water jet cleaning that withstand 100 percent humidity and cleaning baths up to 60 °C, and the third-generation IRB 6790 Foundry Prime, launched in 2018, is rated IP69. Accuracy is the other limit. A six-axis arm is less stiff than a gantry, so precise cuts need calibration, and abrasive cutting keeps using up garnet and nozzles whatever moves the head.

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

Then there are skills. Every robot path for a carpet or a dashboard comes from a CAD model, and somebody has to turn it into a program, check reach and nozzle angle, and move the trim line when the part changes. Most of that work now happens offline, in tools such as RobotStudio. ABB's machine control business takes part as well. B&R, part of the ABB Group, has supplied controls to the Finnish waterjet maker Muototerä for 17 years, and ABB said in December 2025 that the partnership has grown to include ABB Robotics.

High school students watch a waterjet cutter at work at Fairchild Air Force Base, Washington, 2016. Photo: Airman 1st Class Sean Campbell / U.S. Air Force via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

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