Precast Shuttering Robot: Where ABB Robots Fit

In a modern precast plant, the moulds for a wall or a floor slab are rarely built by carpenters. A precast shuttering robot takes the element's design data, sets steel side forms on a production pallet and switches on the magnets that hold them in place, then lifts them off again once the concrete has hardened. This post follows the job from Liverpool's first concrete panel buildings and the plotters that drew outlines on pallets, through the first shuttering robots of the 1990s, to new plants in Poland, Portugal and Singapore this year, and looks at where ABB's six-axis robots, already printing concrete in a Portuguese precast plant, could fit.

Plywood formwork and a formliner with a clay plaster texture laid out on a casting table in a precast concrete plant. Photo: HolgerHw, NOE-Schaltechnik, Wolfgang Köller / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

How formwork moved from carpenters' benches to plotters

Formwork grew out of carpentry and masonry, and on a building site forms are still built from timber and plywood or particleboard, a method that stays common wherever labour costs less than buying reusable forms. Precast concrete moved part of that work indoors. Liverpool's city engineer John Alexander Brodie, who had invented the football goal net in 1889, pioneered precast panel buildings in the city in 1905, and the tram stables at Walton followed in 1906. He also showed a house built from precast reinforced concrete slabs at the Cheap Cottages Exhibition at Letchworth Garden City. Britain did not take the idea up widely, but Central and Eastern Europe did.

The English Heritage blue plaque at 28 Ullet Road, Liverpool, on the home of city engineer John Brodie. Photo: Spudgun67 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Panel factories cast their slabs in reusable moulds, and the forms in a precast plant can be used hundreds to thousands of times before they are replaced. In the East German city of Neubrandenburg, a new panel plant began production in October 1972 around a 25 m concrete mixing tower. Automating the shuttering started with the plotter, a machine with a colour nozzle that traced the outline of each element onto the pallet. Multifunction shuttering machines followed: they removed transverse forms from the pallet, managed pallet storage, cleaned and plotted, put the forms back and oiled them. In wall plants they could only shutter the first and last edge, and everything in between was still set by hand.

The new panel plant in Neubrandenburg, East Germany, as it began production in October 1972, with its concrete mixing tower behind the crane. Photo: Benno Bartocha / Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-L1020-0003 via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE)

The next step came with magnets. Weckenmann, a family-run machine builder from Dormettingen in Swabia, has long supplied shuttering profiles fixed by magnets, which BFT International describes as faster, safer and gentler on the concrete surface, and it later built switchable magnets into the profiles themselves. By its own account it built the world's first shuttering robot for handling shuttering profiles and magnets in 1992. Its Twin-Z robot, shown at bauma 2007, added a second vertical axis, so it could grab a profile by the control button on its magnet and switch the magnet on right after placing it. That cut cycle times by up to 40%.

Steel moulds in the outdoor yard of a concrete works under a crane runway, photographed between 1976 and 1980. Photo: Eugen Nosko / Deutsche Fotothek via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE)

Shuttering robots in Poland, Portugal and Singapore

Weckenmann, now part of the Belgian Construx Group, is still building carousel plants. On 18 September the Polish precast maker GINTER, founded in 1988, officially opened a new factory built around a fully automated Weckenmann carousel system. In Figueira da Foz, Portugal, DST Group commissioned a plant in 2025 whose Weckenmann carousel runs 20 production pallets, with an expansion to 28 planned. There a shuttering robot places and removes magnetic formwork with millimetre accuracy, a distributor doses the concrete, and further stations handle curing, surface finishing, cleaning and oil spraying. Weckenmann's catalogue lists box magnets in 1,000 kg and 2,000 kg versions.

Reinforcing steel, ducts and timber boards set out in a casting bed at a precast plant before a bridge deck panel for an Iowa DOT project is cast. Photo: Federal Highway Administration via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Singapore is standardising its precast parts. On 25 September, Minister for National Development Chee Hong Tat launched HDB's Enhanced Precast Components Catalogue, which standardises 17 types of precast components, such as bathroom units, household shelters and staircases, for projects tendered from December 2026. He said precasters "can produce at greater scale and make better use of automation", and he expects the catalogue to cut project manhours by up to 20%. At Soilbuild's prefabrication hub, a master computer passes design data to the machines, and a shuttering robot places the shutters that hold the concrete, "just like how a cake pan holds batter in place," engineer Lee Kong Jian told AsiaOne in 2022.

An HDB housing block under construction in Singapore, 2023. Photo: LMphotos / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

We found no ABB shuttering robot, but ABB arms have reached precast plants through 3D printing. In August, Vertico reported its largest printing system so far, installed at Sirolis, a Portuguese precast maker founded in 1980: a 3.2 m extended ABB robot arm on a 6.7 m track, printing architectural and decorative pieces under the SIR3D brand. The French firm XtreeE uses ABB six-axis robots and RobotStudio to print building elements off site, though its president Alban Mallet says printing a square "doesn't make sense" because conventional techniques are cheaper. At Digital Concrete 2024 in Munich, researchers showed a six-axis robot placing a reusable shuttering kit on a table and fixing it with magnets, so an ABB arm doing that job is a possibility.

A Vertico print nozzle on an ABB robot laying layers of concrete. Photo: ABB

Where shuttering robots go next, in housing factories and plants

For homes, the push comes from factory-built housing. ABB Robotics and Porsche Consulting announced a modular housing pilot in 2023, and in March 2026 Admares, which develops industrialised home manufacturing, named ABB Robotics a key technology partner for a planned smart factory in Australia. "By integrating robotics into advanced housing manufacturing, we can help enable safer, more efficient and scalable production environments," said ABB's Craig McDonnell. The Munich research points the same way: the team found that reusing whole precast elements could cut their global warming potential by up to 75%, and proposed robot production islands that handle formwork, reinforcement, casting and de-shuttering for complex one-off parts.

An ABB robot building a timber wall panel inside the Cosmic Buildings mobile microfactory. Photo: ABB

Construction as a whole still lags behind other industries. In a survey of 1,900 construction businesses commissioned by ABB, 55% said they use robots, against 84% in automotive and 79% in manufacturing, and 81% planned to introduce or increase robotics within a decade. In plants like Soilbuild's hub, each element already arrives as design data from a master computer. A six-axis arm placing side forms and magnets, or loading cages from a rebar tying robot, would be programmed and checked against the pallet layout in RobotStudio before it touched a real pallet.

XtreeE's concrete print head on an ABB robot beside a batch of printed elements. Photo: ABB

The open problems start with cost. HDB expects robotics and automation to cost slightly more at first and to get cheaper with wider adoption and economies of scale. Variety is harder: makers of solid precast parts have to cope with different sizes and three-dimensional shape details, the kind of work early shuttering machines left to people. People also stay in the plant. Soilbuild says its hub needs staff for supervising, planning and project management, and it trains polytechnic, ITE and university graduates as well as existing employees. HDB adds that standard parts will not mean identical blocks, since designers can still give facades canopies, fins and formliner textures.

A stack of finished full-depth precast bridge deck panels at the precast plant, made for an Iowa bridge project. Photo: Federal Highway Administration via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

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