WALL-E Goes to Work for Cheaper Solar Power

A startup in California has engineered robots to squeeze more juice from solar
panels, bringing new effi ciencies to a costly process

A shiny silver robot zips along a track at a county jail in Dublin, California, and stops beside a
set of solar panels propped up by a giant arm. The robot latches onto the base of the arm and
turns it slowly, tilting the face of the panels like flowers to the sun. By angling the solar panels
just so, the robot helps the panels catch more rays and produce more energy.

This robot, about the size of a microwave oven, is the brainchild of QBotix, a three-year-old
company based in Silicon Valley that unveiled its creation last year. While tilting solar panels to
track the sun's movement isn't a new concept, QBotix has come up with a novel approach that
makes use of advances in robotics technology made over the past two decades. If the idea
proves successful, it could lead to cheaper renewable energy and more efficient use of land for
big solar installations.

Such innovations are important if solar electricity is to achieve costs comparable to power
generated by fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas. And in a time when many solar plants
are being built or planned for remote desert regions, where sunlight and broad swaths of
undeveloped land are abundant, robotics offer a way to minimize the need for on-site workers
to clean, repair and monitor solar panels and tracking equipment.

Construction of a large-scale solar power plant today typically requires armies of workers to
dig ditches, pour concrete, remove trees, weld beams, and distribute materials, among other
tasks. Once a project gets up and running, plant operators usually employ people to clean the
panels using a hose and giant squeegee, or heavy machinery equipped with a mechanical arm
for spraying and wiping. Other workers are needed to repair or replace problematic panels and
parts, and solar plant operators sometimes hire pilots to fly over their arrays and snap infrared
images to spot cracks, short-circuits, and other malfunctions that cause a panel to heat up.
Tilting solar panels to track the sun is accomplished, if at all, by means of hundreds of costly
motors and tons of steel.

QBotix's design, deployed at five pilot sites in California, Arizona and Japan, sends robots
zipping along an elevated monorail constructed alongside rows of solar panels. Each battery-
powered bot is programmed to adjust more than one thousand panels in a carefully
choreographed sequence, tilting each panel in its assigned flock by 10 degrees every 40
minutes to keep pace with the sun’s arc. When its battery charge runs low, the robot
maneuvers itself to a charging point atop the monorail, and plugs in.

"You want to produce as much as energy from the solar panels as possible because that energy
is your revenue," says Wasiq Bokhari, founder and CEO of QBotix. Utilities are often willing to
pay a premium for renewable power delivered during times of high demand, such as the mid-
afternoon, in large part because of ambitious renewable energy mandates by state or local
governments. These efforts to reduce carbon emissions have fueled a boom in solar plant
development, particularly in western states such as California, where utilities must increase
the amount of renewable electricity in their supplies to 33 percent by 2020.

In a conventional solar farm, panels in the Northern Hemisphere are permanently positioned
to face south (in the Southern Angle, north-facing panels capture more sun). But with this
design, known as “fixed-tilt,” panels face the sun directly for only a few hours each day.
To squeeze more electricity out of each panel, large solar project developers in recent years
have begun adding a system of motors, sensors, and other gear to the steel structure that
props up each solar panel. This system, called a tracker, helps to increase energy output by
automatically rotating panels to keep them oriented to the sun’s rays.

Trackers, however, are expensive. Each tracker has its own motor and gear to rotate a set of
several panels. They function best on a level surface, so uneven ground must be graded. This
adds cost and can impact the environment in a way that makes it more difficult to secure
permits. And only the priciest systems tilt panels on two axes—east-west and north-south—
enabling maximum sun exposure during all seasons. (Lower-cost versions tilt panels only east-
west.) As a result, conventional tracking systems force project owners to choose between
investing extra time and money to generate additional energy, or opting for a less costly
system that will generate less revenue.

Robots can offer a happy medium, providing the lower price of a single-axis tracker system
with the higher energy output of a premium dual-axis system. “Traditional dual-axis trackers
require more motors and steel,” says Randy Wu, general manager of development at Trina
Solar, a solar panel maker and project developer that plans to offer QBotix’s technology as an
option in the plants it builds for investors. “QBotix’s approach is very different,” he adds,
because one QBotix robot can do the work of hundreds of dual-axis trackers. The design
eliminates the need to install a field of motors and the elevated rail makes grading
unnecessary. “They control the environment by putting robotics on a rail," says Geoffrey
Kinsey, director of photovoltaic technologies at the Boston-based Fraunhofer Center for
Sustainable Energy Systems.

Using robots to tilt panels, Bokhari says, "is like adding a turbo charger to your engine." And
they can perform other jobs, too. In the world of solar power plant construction and
operation, which still relies largely on manual labor, robotics is an emerging trend. Some
companies, such as Alion Energy and Greenbotics, have engineered robots to wipe away the
sticky, sun-blocking dust that tends to accumulate on solar panels. Another design from Alion
installs solar panels and mounting equipment.

Historically, engineering robots to replace humans has proven a daunting task for some
industries because robots only perform a narrow task and can't adapt to a changing
environment or get trained for new tasks, says Kinsey. Until recently, that has made robots a
more expensive and riskier investment than hiring humans to do jobs such as construction and
electrical repairs. It also makes designing robots for outdoor use particularly challenging.

The emergence of more powerful processors, sensors and sophisticated software have helped
to shrink the size of industrial robots and make them more mobile and smarter at performing
more complex tasks, Kinsey says. He points to Boston-based Rethink Robotics, for example,
which last year unveiled a robot capable of learning to perform different tasks on a factory
assembly line and reacting to changes such as misplaced parts. Another company, called Kiva
Systems (acquired by Amazon in 2012), is supplying fleets of robots to warehouses around the
country. Controlled by a central computer, the mobile orange robots buzz around warehouse
floors and scan barcodes on the ground to retrieve items off the shelves for shipping. And at
Tesla Motors’ factory in California, robots on the company’s highly automated assembly line
can switch between multiple functions. "They are like Edward Scissorhands," Kinsey says.

Designs are improving. QBotix’s robots are equipped with GPS, sensors, and wireless
communication equipment to record and report their work. And the company unveiled a
streamlined version of its robots-on-rails system this summer, showcasing a smaller, lighter,
and faster bot capable of managing 340 kilowatts of solar panels every 40 minutes. That’s an
array large enough to cover the rooftops of 85 typical single-family homes in California. "It's an
aerodynamic design for ruggedness and speed—as if you marry a Hummer with a
Lamborghini," says Bokhari.

QBotix says its technology could produce up to 15 percent more electricity than a project using
single-axis trackers—without additional cost. "QBotix is a leap ahead because it's brought the
cost way way down,” says Wu. “It's very appealing,"

The company has plans to develop its technology beyond tracker robots. Its team of 15
engineers is working on a new robot that would clean solar panels and detect cracks or other
problems with solar panels and equipment, Bokhari says. The idea is to use the same rail
system but different robots to do the work, or to set up a system just for the cleaning and
inspection robots.

Although using robots to adjust solar panels is a sound proposition, Kinsey says, the day when
robots will overtake humans in doing most of the building and running of solar power plants
remains far off. Utilities looking to purchase electricity from solar developers want to lock in
power prices for 20 years or more, so prospective customers want assurances that new
technology from new companies like QBotix and its peers will be reliable over the long term.
With each round of the track, the robots are gathering data to make their case.