Robots Built to Clean and Install Solar Panels

Rover, a robot, placing a solar panel in a track at Alion Energy, which is looking to shave labor costs

       In Richmond, California, there are low-tech robots installing and maintaining large-scale solar farms, at least a start-up company, known as Alion Energy, believes so. Working in near secrecy until recently, the company is ready to use its machines in three projects in the next few months in California, Saudi Arabia, and China. If all goes well, executives expect that they can help bring the price of solar electricity into line with that of natural gas by cutting the cost of building and maintaining large solar installations.
       In recent years, the solar industry has wrung enormous costs from developing farms, largely through reducing the price of solar panels more than 70% since 2008. But with prices about as low as manufacturers say they can go, the industry is turning its attention to finding savings in other areas.
       "We've been in this mode for the past decade in the industry of really just focusing on module costs because they used to be such a big portion of system costs," said Arno Harris, chief executive of Recurrent Energy, a solar farm developer, and chairman of the board of the Solar Energy Industries Association. Now, Mr. Harris said, "Eliminating the physical plant costs is a major area of focus through eliminating materials and eliminating labor."

Featuring: The Husqvarna Automower Solar Hybrid

          For those living in the rural areas surrounded by grass, it would be a hassle to continuously trim those weeds and plants with a lawnmower that you may haul towards the ground back and forth. Therefore, it is no surprise that Husqvarna Global Design Centre, located in Sweden, has thought of the idea to create a robotic lawnmower that is able to complete the task for you, whether you are at home, away or even when it is raining outside.

       
          There is four main components to the lawnmower: its body, charging station, transformer cable and loop wire. 90% of its body is made of recyclable materials and it is quite small in size (almost equivalent in size to a carry-on luggage). In addition to its charging station, it comes with a large integrated solar panel. This, in turn, helps cut the lawn in a shorter period of time while having a lower power consumption and an extended battery life.

For more details, click here.

Robots taking over the world!

Introducing "Qbotix," the world's first monorail robot, equipped with 20 solar panel arrays, trailing behind a small tuna-shaped robot called the "Solbot." Over time, the sun moves 10 degrees in approximately every 40 minutes, decreasing the efficiency of our solar panels that are being engineered today all across the world. So, in order to get the job done more efficiently in harvesting the energy of the sun from sunrise to daybreak, "Qbotix" had designed a robot that moves through steel pipes like a small roller coaster, tracking the position of the sun while moving with it in order to retrieve the most efficiency of the sun without consuming much energy during the process.

A California based startup, Qbotix, has now come up with a robot that does the job efficiently without consuming a lot of energy in the process.

However, here's Germany with their huge robotic arms engineered to install solar panels onto steel racks. This robot is called "Momo" and it could do the work of 250 workers required to build a 100 megawatt photo voltaic power plant. The main idea of this project was to save large amounts of money, mainly towards labor. Towards a construction of a 14 watt solar plant, reports say that the company could cut the cost nearly half of what they had originally paid in which it came up to approximately $2 million in total. 

Renewable robot: A robotic arm places a large photovoltaic panel onto a frame during the construction of a solar plant near Leipzig, Germany. The panel is nearly six square meters in size and weighs 120 kilograms.