Slipforming: From Manual to Robotic Slipforming

Abstract

In the 20th century, a series of ground-breaking developments and innovations in industry, materials, engineering and built environments profoundly influenced architectural design and construction. These innovations revolutionized the construction industry, facilitating rapid and standardized building processes and enabling widespread adoption of new construction techniques among key stakeholders. As exemplified in this paper, one such innovation, slipforming, was adopted as a standardized construction system applicable to storage silos, structural cores, walls, and pillars. Even though slipforming emerged as a manual technique, it has evolved into a fully automated process, initially limited to large-scale on-site construction of standard and non-standard shapes. The initial cost of slipforming limited this technique to large-scale structures that were no lower than 20 meters in height. However, with the recent emergence of robotics in construction, slipforming has proven to be efficient for prefabrication, demonstrating its potential to enhance the efficiency of building component optimization. This study aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the historical development of slipforming, focusing on four noteworthy projects, namely Peavey-Haglin’s slipform structure, the CN Tower in Toronto, the Sakhalin II oil rig platform (demonstrating the power of CAD), and finally robotic slipforming, also known as Smart Dynamic Casting (SDC), which demonstrates how slipforming can be used for the prefabrication of bespoke and optimized structures. Together, these four projects illustrate the evolution from manual to robotic slipforming.