By: Shawn Wang

Many companies are competing to build large solar farms around the United States. But there’s a problem: there aren’t enough workers. It can be especially difficult to gather a group of workers to lift and install hundreds of panels, each weighing over 60 pounds, every day in 110 Fahrenheit (43 Celsius) heat in the desert. So, they are using robots for help. “We’re seeing labor shortages on construction projects in the United States, and it’s a bottleneck to the build-out of solar farms,” said Andrés Gluski, president and chief executive officer of AES, in an interview.

AES Corporation, one of the country’s biggest renewable energy companies, introduced the first robot, nicknamed Maximo, that can install solar panels twice as fast as humans and at half the cost. Maximo has large extendable arms with suction cups to pick up solar panels and install them neatly into rows by using artificial intelligence and computer vision.

After a few months of testing, AES will put Maximo in the California desert to install panels for Amazon data centers. If the project is successful, the company will build hundreds of similar AI-powered robots.

Sources: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/30/climate/solar-panels-robots-maximo-construction.html