An automation system of installing the tanks of electric water heaters was designed based on the detailed analysis of actual production with working procedure in installing and detection. The controller of the system was included comprehensively a Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) and a Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench (LabVIEW), the LabVIEW was designed for analyzing and processing the image information of the tanks acquired by the Charge Coupled Decive (CCD) camera, and the PLC was designed for controlling a KUKA robot, which used to install the tanks of fetching and setting，according to the detected information. The results of the installation and debugging of the system under the actual working conditions show that the automation system is more reliable efficient and safe when compared to the traditional manual operations of tanks of fetching and setting, which indicate the system of a strong application value.