Robot-Installed Solar Panels Cut Costs by 50%

A different kind of solar #innovation: Robot-Installed #Solar Panels Aims to Cut Costs by 50% #PV

Solar panels are obeying the will of Moore's Law by getting ever cheaper and more efficient. What's not getting cheaper or more efficient is the human labor required to install them. This keeps the cost of going solar higher than us duck-squeezing envirinmintl types would like, but robots are busy coming to our rescue by setting up solar power plants much cheaper and much, much faster. Here's the executive summary, since I've never done an executive summary before and it sounds fancy: using robots to set up a 14 megawatt solar power plant can potentially cuts costs from $2,000,000 to $900,000, while being constructed in eight times faster with only three human workers instead of 35. So there you go! If you're still reading, we can tell you a little bit about the robot that performs this incredible feat of engineering efficiency: it costs just under a million bucks, but it'...

Full article: http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-ro...