AI-Driven Robot Installs Nearly 10,000 Solar Modules in Australia (cleantechnica.com) 56
Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares an article from Renewables Now: Chinese tech company Leapting has successfully completed its first commercial deployment of photovoltaic (PV) modules with an AI-driven solar module mounting robot in Australia. The Chinese company was tasked with supporting the installation of French Neoen's (EPA:NEOEN) 350-MW/440-MWp Culcairn Solar Farm in New South Wales' Riverina region. Shanghai-based Leapting said this week that its intelligent robot has installed almost 10,000 modules at an "efficient, safe, and stable" pace that has "significantly" reduced the original construction timeline.
Litian Intelligent was deployed at the Australian project site in early February. The machine has a 2.5-metre-high robotic arm sitting on a self-guided, self-propelled crawler. Equipped with a navigation system, and visual recognition technology, it can lift and mount PV panels weighing up to 30 kilograms. By replacing labour-intensive manual operations, the robot shortens the module installation cycle by 25%, while the installation efficiency increases three to five times as compared to manual labour and is easily adapted to complex environments, Leapting says.
Or, as Clean Technica puts it, "Meet the robot replacing four workers at a time on solar projects." This is part of a broader industrial trend. In the United States, Rosendin Electric demonstrated its own semi-autonomous system in Texas that allowed a two-person team to install 350 to 400 modules per day, a clear step-change from traditional methods. AES Corporation has been developing a robot called Maximo that combines placement and fastening with computer vision. Trina Solar's Trinabot in China operates in a similar space, with prototype systems demonstrating 50-plus modules per hour... In an industry where time-to-energy is critical, shaving weeks off the construction schedule directly reduces costs and increases net revenue...
[T]he direction is clear. The future of solar construction will be faster, safer, and more precise — not because of human brawn, but because of robotic repetition. There will still be humans on-site, but their role shifts from lifting panels to managing throughput. Just as cranes and excavators changed civil construction, so too will robots like Leapting's define the next era of solar deployment.
Litian Intelligent was deployed at the Australian project site in early February. The machine has a 2.5-metre-high robotic arm sitting on a self-guided, self-propelled crawler. Equipped with a navigation system, and visual recognition technology, it can lift and mount PV panels weighing up to 30 kilograms. By replacing labour-intensive manual operations, the robot shortens the module installation cycle by 25%, while the installation efficiency increases three to five times as compared to manual labour and is easily adapted to complex environments, Leapting says.
Or, as Clean Technica puts it, "Meet the robot replacing four workers at a time on solar projects." This is part of a broader industrial trend. In the United States, Rosendin Electric demonstrated its own semi-autonomous system in Texas that allowed a two-person team to install 350 to 400 modules per day, a clear step-change from traditional methods. AES Corporation has been developing a robot called Maximo that combines placement and fastening with computer vision. Trina Solar's Trinabot in China operates in a similar space, with prototype systems demonstrating 50-plus modules per hour... In an industry where time-to-energy is critical, shaving weeks off the construction schedule directly reduces costs and increases net revenue...
[T]he direction is clear. The future of solar construction will be faster, safer, and more precise — not because of human brawn, but because of robotic repetition. There will still be humans on-site, but their role shifts from lifting panels to managing throughput. Just as cranes and excavators changed civil construction, so too will robots like Leapting's define the next era of solar deployment.
Cutting off one's nose to spite one's face (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Cutting off one's nose to spite one's face (Score:4, Interesting)
Could be a game changer for rapidly building solar farms anywhere with minimal manpower and skill needed.
Could also be useful for exploring the moon and Mars.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Is there perhaps some magic search engine you use that tells you otherwise?
Yeah. To catch you up to speed it's called "web search" and it's not magic. It's better than Gopher by a long shot, and better than those old "internet yellow page directories" that you could get.
They're pretty straightforward, start using them and you'll get the hang of it quick.
It's nothing we can't build ourselves (Score:1, Troll)
Re: (Score:2)
Did you copy and paste that all at once?
Re: (Score:2)
Imagine how many solar panels you could install for $1.9 trillion? Too bad that money was all wasted on reducing inflation. ...
Re: (Score:2)
That would be 1.79 terawatts, which would require about 28975 km2, which is about 7% of the land area of California.
Re: Mark my words robots and automation will (Score:2)
Im gonna get rich having robots make burgers for robots, sine no people will buy them.
Wealth is value, value is water to the thirsty food to the hungry coats to the cold etc. Anyone who has these things without demand may as well have nothing. Ultimately the power of AI machines is proportional to their freedom, no smart man being controlled by a stupid monkey does better than one who controls himself. So either the idea is inferior people have innate value and robots care for all people, or they do not and
Re: (Score:2)
Why? How?
Did China prohibit the export? If not, these things are attainable, even to US companies. You only need one to reverse engineer.
The Japanese did it to the US and Europe and the Chinese did as well.
Just do the same?
Really, all this whining is getting on my nerves.
In Australia (Score:3)
All installed upside-down, no doubt.
Re: (Score:2)
All installed upside-down, no doubt.
Possible responses: :-)
(a) Duh, the Sun is also upside down there.
(b) Do you mean oriented 180 degrees top-to-bottom or back-to-front - or both?
Re: (Score:1)
It is hard to tell if the sun is upside down but the moon sure is.
Not neural network based (Score:5, Informative)
Calling it AI-driven because buzzword bingo because the thing that everyone is now referring to as "AI" is based on neural networks, where it effectively guesses what to do based on previous situation. This on the other hand is appears to be entirely based your regular old logic that is programmed by humans. You could claim it's an expert system [wikipedia.org] but calling that an AI has been out of fashion for decades. Their own product page [leapting.com] never refers to it as AI but does say it is intelligent.
Is it autonomous? Yes but only within specified parameters. Is it AI? Sure, in so far that a paper-towel dispenser is an AI because it recognizes when a new paper-towel needs to be dispensed, just a like a human.
Re:Not neural network based (Score:5, Informative)
Here is another one that looks remarkably similar [youtube.com]. Also based primarily on standardization of components and repetition. Here is another one [youtu.be], which seems to have been funded by Amazon.
Re: (Score:2)
We had image recognition before the term "AI" was bandied about. We're coming up on fifteen years of facial recognition for unlocking phones, long before the tech companies were using the term as a marketing concept.
I could easily believe that the software taking camera input has been programmed to recognize the particular shapes germane to the job that it is doing and to use that input to vary what it's doing. I would hesitate to call that "AI". If that's AI, then those IC sorting robots that we've had
Re: (Score:2)
We had image recognition before the term "AI" was bandied about
Not exactly, AI is almost as old as computers. A* search is AI, even if it's not intelligent. The term "AI" has been exaggerated to mean many things, and this was true from the beginning.
I would hesitate to call that "AI". If that's AI,
It's not really worth arguing about though, because people use the terms they want. Say, "it's not general AI." Call it weak AI. Say it's just an algorithm. Say it's not more intelligent than a calculator. But if you try to say it's not AI, then people will be able to disagree by redefining the word.
Re: (Score:1)
What if any Joe Blow can use English to control the robot?
Re: Not neural network based (Score:2)
Re: Not neural network based (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
We had image recognition before the term "AI" was bandied about.
And those systems fell into two categories: 1) Systems which had limited / basic logic, and 2) Systems which were trained on image datasets in a way that we now refer to as "AI".
Yes. I have been using "AI" for my work as well, long before people called it "AI". That doesn't change the fact that what we call it now objectively fits that criteria. Heck technically an early form of computer vision from the 60s would qualify for what we call today "AI". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
They look like bifacial panels in the video too. Solar cells on both sides, so that they can catch the direct sunlight and the reflected light off the ground.
Re: (Score:1)
"the thing that everyone is now referring to as "AI" is based on neural networks"
Why did the Attention is all you need article, saying you don't need neural networks to do context sensitivity, produce the paradigm shift of a conversational AI that neural networks alone could never produce?
Re: (Score:2)
Why did the Attention is all you need article,
There are multiple possible inquiries that could be inferred from your presumably mangled-while-editing post, so I'm going to need you to clarify.
Re: (Score:2)
Neural Networks are a subset of AI. Not the other way round.
Re: (Score:2)
Do you mean like an expert system for which my comment has a link to a wikipedia article about? ;)
Just a friendly reminder that it is best to read comments in their entirety to avoid stating the obvious.
It Should Be Smart To Install Them Everywhere (Score:2)
That uses electricity or else this is all a PR stunt as usual.
Re: (Score:1)
You're a stunt.
It's in a paddock in the middle of a remote farming community. The robot saved the installer the cost of labor.
baseload? (Score:1)
Re:baseload? (Score:4, Insightful)
Batteries are growing *very* fast. US is on pace to double it's install base this year alone.
Won't be grid scale tomorrow but in a decade a significant percentage of grid demand will be battery sourced.
CA is already flattening the duck curve with late afternoon battery storage https://energycentral.com/c/em... [energycentral.com]
Re:baseload? (Score:4, Interesting)
more gish gallop.
The reason solar is eminently viable is the simple math of 8000:1 over supply. More solar energy hits the earth in an hour than the human race uses, in all forms, in an entire year. Haven't seen the numbers on wind but I'll assume it's at least 1/4 of that. Even at your 20% solar figure, that's 1500-2000x what we need. Utterly stupid not to see that as a primary source - add in no moving parts and just sits there, basically the minimum amount of maint needed. Nothing else even comes close.
Batteries are absolutely going to up end the system when paired with fuel free power generation like solar and wind. Hydro power *generation* is already maxed out as it has significant placement and other negatives.
Re: baseload? (Score:2)
The thing to remember is solar energy creates the heat pressure imbalances that makes the wind, it evaporates the ocean water to run the rivers, it is the energy stored in sugars in plants that become fossil fuels. It is the source. Which is to say nuclear fusion is the source. All we need is a global internet of energy transmission and we would be set right now.
Re: (Score:1)
more gish gallop.
Bullshit. This is simple math to show how solar + batteries are a waste of resources for power to an electrical grid. Off-grid power is different, there's many examples on how solar + batteries are useful when beyond the reach of an electrical grid.
If there's a source of power that stays on 24/7 like a fleet of nuclear power plants then battery storage needs only manage the hour by hour variations in demand. With solar power there's only a few hours per day to charge up batteries so to make up for the re
Re: (Score:2)
You are indeed quite wrong. Batteries are already made of things like *sand* for thermal storage and *sodium* for electrical storage, hardly materials we have a short supply of.
There may be some edge cases where non-battery solutions make better sense, but those will be quite the minority. Battery storage of renewable energy allows us to shift a literal limitless supply of free energy to when and where it's needed.
It's fascinating to see someone argue against a basically no fuel no maintenance solution.
Re: (Score:2)
This should not be a difficult concept to grasp.
Every concept looks easy when you're ignorant of the masses of variables that go into making such a decision, e.g. the cost for generation of Wind/solar + battery backup to the point of achieving baseload for much of the inhabited area of the earth is currently less than that of building a nuclear power plant. Including the batteries that is.
When you ignore some variables nuclear becomes a great option. But hey if you want to ignore parts of the equation arbitrarily then you may as well do coal.
Re: (Score:2)
Your entire argument is a false binary dressed in engineering drag. It's a textbook case of energy punditry by omission: the math checks out only because the premises are rigged. It cherry-picks capacity factors, ignores cost curves, handwaves away deployment timelines, and treats energy policy like a cage match between lone contenders instead of a collaborative grid. What you are spinning is a pro-nuclear sermon disguised as analysis—one that forgets solar is already winning where it matters most: i
Re:baseload? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:1)
What does that have to do with robot installation?
Everyone knows that if you can't solve every problem all at once. It's best to do nothing and wait for someone else to fix your problem for you.
Everyone can go back to their MAGA rally while waiting for China to fix it.
Re: (Score:2)
Man, if only someone had invented a way to store electricity.
10,000 modules (Score:2)
THAT MANY modules?
Indeed, that robot is driven.
Just .. Awesome. (Score:1)
Robots installing solar. Pave the deserts with panels.
Re: (Score:2)