When Stolbek set out to build a robotic sanding system for woodworking, the first decision was the most important: which robot.
Not which brand looks best in marketing photos. Which robot can sand doors all day, every day, in a dusty woodworking shop, and deliver identical results on the thousandth door that it delivered on the first. The answer was Yaskawa.
Yaskawa is one of the largest industrial robot manufacturers in the world. Their robots run in automotive assembly plants, aerospace manufacturing facilities, pharmaceutical labs, and food processing lines — environments where precision, reliability, and continuous operation are non-negotiable. The GP12 is the specific model inside every Cosmo SC sanding cell.
Handles the multi-head end-of-arm tool — 5" orbital disc, 3" × 5" orbital pad, and 2" corner breaking head — without strain or precision loss.
Follows contours on raised panels, navigates inside corners on shaker doors, runs along edges, and breaks corners — all on the same part.
Sealed against dust ingress and moisture. Rated for the fine particulate MDF dust that gets into everything in a woodworking shop.
No lubrication intervals. No belt replacements. No scheduled downtime for robot service. It runs.
Precise repeatability: the GP12 returns to the same position with ±0.02mm accuracy. In sanding, that means the pressure, angle, and path are identical on every single part.
Some competitors use cobots for sanding applications. Cobots are designed for working alongside humans — they're lighter, slower, and intentionally limited in force. For sanding, those limitations matter. For the full industrial vs. cobot breakdown, see Industrial Sanding Solutions.
Stolbek is not a robotics company that entered woodworking. It's a woodworking company that built robots. Brad Cairns — Stolbek's founder — ran a cabinet shop. He chose Yaskawa because his shop needed a machine that could sand doors all day without breaking down, without losing precision, and without requiring a robotics engineer to keep it running.
The Yaskawa GP12 gave him the platform. Stolbek built everything around it — the sanding cell, the end-of-arm tooling, the vacuum table, the touchscreen controls, the sanding recipes. The result is a system where the operator doesn't need to know anything about robotics. They just load a door, swipe to start, and let the Yaskawa do what Yaskawa does best: work. For more on how Stolbek was founded, visit the About page.