A metal casting installation is provided that includes a robot configured for carrying out the operations of handing a new ladle shroud to a manipulator of the ladle located at the loading station, and coupling a driving device to the ladle slide gate each manipulator is fixed relative to the corresponding first or second ladle such as to move together with the corresponding first or second ladle between the loading station and the casting station.

A method for producing ultra-thin hot-rolled strip steel, the method comprising the following process steps: A. a smelting process: feeding scrap steel into an induction electric furnace (1) for smelting so that the scrap steel melts into molten steel; B. a refining process: using a ladle refining furnace (2) and a ladle vacuum degassing furnace (3) to refine the molten steel; C. a continuous casting process: casting the refined molten steel into a cast strip blank that has a thickness of 1.6-2.5 mm by means of a dual-roller thin strip continuous casting system (4); D. a hot rolling process: directly feeding the cast strip blank that was cast in the continuous casting process to a single-stand hot rolling mill (9) for rolling to produce hot-rolled strip steel, the thickness of the hot-rolled strip steel being 0.8-1.5 mm; E. a cooling coiling process: performing atomizing cooling on the hot-rolled strip steel, and coiling after the strip steel temperature is controlled to be 400-750 C. The present method achieves an extremely compact, environmentally-friendly and economical ultra-thin hot-rolled strip steel production process flow, and achieves the environmentally-friendly and economical continuous production of metal plates and strips.