Woodworking Robot Sanding: ABB Arms in the Wood Shop

Sanding is the slowest and dustiest step in making furniture. It shakes the hands and arms, and the result depends on holding the same pressure for hours. That is why the woodworking robot is moving from cutting into sanding and finishing, the last steps before a cabinet door or chair part gets its lacquer. This post starts with hand tools and copying lathes, then follows CNC routers and the first finishing robots. After that come the robotic sanding machines shown at IWF 2026 in Atlanta and ABB's force-controlled arms, including its new GoFa sanding cell, and a look at what small shops and large furniture plants can expect next.

A woodworker in Cairo sands a curved wooden frame by hand. Photo: FischerFotos / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From hand planes to copying lathes and CNC routers

For most of history wood was shaped and smoothed by hand. A cabinetmaker cut joints with saws and chisels, then flattened and smoothed the boards with planes, scrapers and abrasives. Sandpaper itself is old: in 13th-century China, crushed shells, seeds and sand were glued to parchment with natural gum. By the late 1800s much furniture was made in factories, and in August 1908 the photographer Lewis Hine recorded young workers taking their noon break in an Indianapolis furniture factory. Powered saws and planers did the heavy cutting in plants like that, while much of the smoothing and finishing stayed manual work.

Young workers on their noon break in a furniture factory in Indianapolis, August 1908. Photo: Lewis Hine / US National Archives via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The first machine that copied a wooden shape on its own came from gun making. Around 1818 Thomas Blanchard, working for the Springfield Armory, built a copying lathe that traced a model and turned gun stocks to the same contour automatically. From the 1850s the same idea was used to make wooden shoe lasts, so shoes could be made in standard sizes for the first time. Water-powered Blanchard lathes from the 1850s still stand in the restored gunsmith shop at Harpers Ferry, driven through pulleys and leather belts. A model went in and identical wooden parts came out, which is still what a factory wants from a sanding robot.

A water-powered Blanchard copying lathe from the 1850s in the gunsmith shop at Harpers Ferry. Photo: Jarek Tuszyński / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Computer control reached woodworking in the late 1960s. The Japanese company Shoda says it developed Japan's first CNC router in 1968, and CNC routers went on to cut panels, doors and curved parts straight from a drawing. Robots entered finishing at about the same time. In 1967 the Norwegian wheelbarrow maker Trallfa finished the prototype of a spray painting robot, which recorded a skilled painter's movements on magnetic tape and played them back. ASEA, which became part of ABB in 1988, bought a majority of Trallfa's robot business in 1985 and the rest in 1988, so Trallfa's painting robots became ABB paint robots.

An early Trallfa industrial robot on display at the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology in Oslo. Photo: Bjoertvedt / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Robotic sanding at IWF 2026 and in ABB cells

At IWF 2026 in Atlanta, held from 25 to 28 August with more than 900 exhibitors, several stands ran sanding robots. Stolbek kept three machines working: the COSMO XB for cabinet doors, panels and larger parts, and two Ultimate Edge Sanders for the edges and corners of MDF and solid wood parts. Its smaller Cosmo SC is built around a Yaskawa GP12 robot. Nederman showed robotic sanding with dust extraction at the tool. In its report from the show, published on 16 September, Wood Industry wrote that SurfPrep's case for the robot was steadier pressure and more even abrasive wear than a person can manage by hand.

A cabinetmaker sands boards in the craft village of Thiès, Senegal, 2024. Photo: Alioune Badara Niang / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Sanding is harder for a robot than cutting because wood is not uniform. ABB's 2009 brochure for the wood industries points to knots, wormholes and bark pockets, and describes its Machining Force Control software, with functions called FC Pressure and FC SpeedChange, which let the robot adapt to the consistency and contour of the material. ABB listed assembling wooden window frames, polishing the edges of tabletops and routing designs in panels as uses. In an ABB video, its robots sand and brush wooden furniture panels for Swedwood, IKEA's furniture making arm, in Slovakia. For heavier sanding heads, an arm like the IRB 4600, with payloads of 20 to 60 kg and reaches up to 2.55 m, is a possible fit.

An ABB robot works on a long wooden part clamped in a fixture, with dust hoses overhead. Photo: ABB

ABB's newest product for this job is aimed at smaller shops. In May 2026 it launched the OmniVance Collaborative Surface Finishing Cell, its first fully automated sanding and polishing cell. Inside is a GoFa cobot that lifts 12 kg, reaches 1,270 mm and has integrated force control, working over an 1,800 by 800 mm bench. The sanding version stores discs and takes standard sanding wheels from 77 to 125 mm. Operators record paths by guiding the arm by hand or pick 2D presets on a tablet, using Wizard easy programming blocks, and ABB says this can cut programming time by up to 90%. The cell is CE-certified and ready for dust extraction.

A GoFa cobot sands a curved wooden panel with a Mirka sander inside ABB's OmniVance finishing cell. Photo: ABB

Where wood sanding robots go next

Wood Industry's IWF report said robotic sanding is becoming relevant to smaller manufacturers because robots are now familiar on show floors and shops still struggle to fill repetitive sanding jobs. Stolbek and ABB are going after that market with compact cells that an operator can teach without a robot programmer, and that can switch between short runs of different parts. For people who build furniture at home or in a makerspace, a sanding cobot is still far too expensive. The nearer change for them is that more of the parts and flat-pack furniture they buy will have been sanded by a robot.

A DMS CNC router with a carved wooden piece on its bed at SITU Fabrication, 2022. Photo: Rhododendrites / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Several problems are still open. Wood varies from board to board, so a path that works on one oak door can round over or burn the edge of the next unless pressure and speed adjust, which makes force control more important in sanding than in cutting. Fine dust is a health and fire risk and has to be captured at the tool, as Nederman showed in Atlanta. People still change the discs, and a trained eye still checks the finish under raking light. Cost is the other barrier, because a cell has to pay for itself on a shop's real mix of parts.

An ABB robot with a flat finishing head over a wooden part in a cell with dust extraction. Photo: ABB

In large plants, sanding robots join lines where ABB robots already work. ABB's 2010 case study on Swedwood's factory in Hultsfred, Sweden, which made the PAX wardrobe for IKEA, describes 30 ABB robots running around the clock and a packed wardrobe leaving the line every ten seconds. Sanding and finishing cells added to lines like that would have their paths tested first in RobotStudio and their robots monitored remotely for wear, as Swedwood's already were. People in those plants would spend more time setting up cells and checking finishes, and they would still handle the parts that are too odd for any robot.

An ABB robot handling furniture panels, from ABB's 2010 Swedwood case study. Photo: ABB

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