This solar-building robot is designed to solve one of the industry s biggest problems

Get the Full StoryThese massive robotic arms assemble panels at solar farms so that they re ready to be quickly installed.

Three years ago, robotics engineer Banks Hunter drove deep into the Mojave Desert to see a solar farm under construction. Cardboard boxes with around 2 million solar panels were scattered over tens of thousands of acres. The boxes sat next to steel beams that had been hammered into the ground in a grid. Hundreds of people were walking up and down the rows removing the panels and screwing them into the steel mounting equipment, over and over. The whole process would take six months. My gut take was, this is insane, Hunter says. There s no way that this incredibly manual process is going to scale toward the massive energy transition of the entire grid.

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