From CleanTechnica, April 25:
At a dusty solar site outside Culcairn, New South Wales, a tracked robot methodically rolled between rows of steel posts, hoisting large photovoltaic panels with a vacuum arm and placing them onto pre-aligned mounting structures. In the brutal Australian sun, where manual laborers need regular hydration breaks and safety protocols for heatstroke, this squat machine didn’t stop. It marked a quiet inflection point in the story of solar construction. The robot, built by Shanghai-based Leapting Technology, was not an experiment. It was a production unit doing production work. And it just replaced the output of a crew of three or four installers on one of the country’s biggest utility-scale projects.
The global solar industry has a speed problem. It’s not that we don’t know how to build solar plants, as gigawatts of new capacity are being added annually. The problem is the scale and velocity required to meet climate goals outstrip our ability to find, train, and deploy the human muscle to physically install it all. According to the IEA, the world needs to install over 800 gigawatts of solar annually by the early 2030s to stay on track for net-zero. That translates to hundreds of millions of modules every year. The act of moving a 30-kilogram glass rectangle from a pallet, hoisting it overhead, aligning it precisely with a torque tube, and securing it — again and again in the heat, for weeks on end — is not just time-consuming. It’s physically punishing. Labor shortages, injuries, and burnout are all limiting throughput. Automation isn’t just a convenience, it’s becoming a necessity. This is far from the early days of solar when side of the road pickups for unskilled day labor were the norm.
Leapting’s robotic system, deployed commercially for the first time at Culcairn, is a tracked vehicle with a six-axis robotic arm equipped with an AI-guided vacuum suction gripper. It uses 3D sensors, posture recognition algorithms, and onboard simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) navigation to position itself within millimeter-level precision. Once loaded with a stack of panels, it autonomously moves through the array, identifies the mounting points, aligns each module, and places it. According to field data from the project, the robot was installing panels at a rate of about 60 per hour — roughly 480 in a standard eight-hour day. That’s roughly three to five times faster than a typical human crew of four people, which often tops out at around 100–120 modules per day due to fatigue, heat limits, and the need for team coordination.
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. The range of architectures varies — some systems are fully autonomous like Leapting’s, others are designed to augment human crews — but the theme is consistent: labor productivity is being multiplied. In an industry where time-to-energy is critical, shaving weeks off the construction schedule directly reduces costs and increases net revenue.
What sets Leapting’s system apart is its full autonomy....
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