How TALOS is revolutionising PV management with robotics

A major challenge with the use of solar PV is keeping the panels in operating condition, clean and well maintained so that the output is maximised. This can be particularly true in remote areas, which can be challenging to access and where also conditions tend to be more extreme, perhaps with more birds present and in some more sand or humidity in the environment.

This is where TALOS comes in developing robotic and digital AI-based solutions to support the operation and maintenance of the PV, with a focus on three PV types: the standard ground mounted PV, floating PV located in water bodies and agrivoltaics in which the PV is installed in an agricultural setting.

“The operation of PV is getting more complex as plants are becoming more remote and O&M costs are increasing and at the same time there are safety constraints and workforce limitations, so the sector is at a critical point and TALOS addresses a very concrete problem in the industry,” Daniel comments.

With the three-year project now in the closing stages, Daniel says a highlight has been an ‘open call’ that was held to fund European SMEs and startups to expand its scope, with the result that TALOS has delivered no less than 30 different solutions alongside those initially proposed.

“The fact that we could co-create the technologies from the very beginning is something quite unique in our experience. Just one of the use cases would have been sufficient to justify a project of this type.”

As an example, he mentions PV panel cleaning, saying the approach is quite different for floating and ground mounted PV. For the floating PV an approximately 80kg robot about the size of a standard domestic autonomous vacuum cleaner was developed, whereas for a utility scale ground mounted application a much larger 12t machine with large brushes and a water tank is proposed.

Into that also comes the AI with multiple datasets required to optimise the use case, including a mapping of the facility and its location, whether for cleaning, detecting panel defects or in the case of agri PV checking crop health and yields, but most importantly for the robots to operate autonomously.

“As a sense of the scale of this consider that Tesla has been trying to implement full self-driving capabilities for over a decade but have not yet achieved that yet. In a power plant there are different risks, for example associated with the operation, and in remote locations the internet can be poor so one can’t operate an autonomous robot safely.”

In the remaining months of the project the whole ecosystem of solutions are being demonstrated in the three PV scenarios and technological, economic and environmental analyses are being prepared, with a view to enabling further maturing of the technologies and ultimately delivery of market ready solutions.

That will then be a day for PV operators to look out for.

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