Solar Panel Cleaning Robot: Hoses, Brushes, ABB

Dust, pollen, bird droppings and sand all cut the light that reaches a solar cell, so panels make less power the dirtier they get. For decades the fix was a person with a hose, a soft brush and a long pole. A solar panel cleaning robot does that job on a schedule, often at night and often without water. This post covers how rooftop and desert panels were cleaned by hand, the Israeli solar park that handed the job to robots in 2014, the new cleaning robots from TrinaTracker and BayRobot, and where ABB robots fit in the solar business today.

Cleaning rooftop solar modules with a brush on a long pole in Dornbirn, Austria, 2026. Photo: Asurnipal / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How panels were cleaned by hand

Early on, cleaning solar panels was a chore like washing windows. Owners climbed up with a bucket, a hose and a squeegee, or wiped the glass with a cloth. In April 2011 the US Department of Agriculture photographed staff at The Wash Basket laundromat in Palmyra, Pennsylvania, wiping down the panels on its roof. In snowy places people pushed snow off with brooms. On a house the work is cheap but risky, because it means walking on a roof or reaching from a ladder, and pressure washers or hard brushes can scratch the glass.

Wiping the roof panels at The Wash Basket laundromat in Palmyra, Pennsylvania, April 2011. Photo: U.S. Department of Agriculture via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Big plants had the same problem on a much larger scale. Soiling, the industry term for dirt building up on the glass, can cut output by up to 35 percent, according to the Israeli cleaning robot maker Ecoppia. Utility sites sent crews with water trucks, brushes and pressure hoses down long rows of modules. In deserts, where the sun is strongest, water is scarce and dust storms are frequent. At Ketura Sun, in Israel's Negev desert, manual washing was so expensive that the panels were cleaned only about nine times a year, and each round took up to five days.

Rooftop solar modules dulled by a film of spring pollen before cleaning in Dornbirn, Austria. Photo: Asurnipal / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Ketura Sun was where robots took over. The 8 hectare park, owned by Siemens and Arava Power and producing about 9 million kilowatt hours a year, had been Israel's first utility scale solar project when it opened in 2011. In March 2014 Ecoppia announced that nearly 100 of its E4 robots now cleaned the whole field every night, without water, using microfiber and airflow and running on their own small solar panels. A pilot had shown the robots removing 99 percent of the dust daily, and the full fleet went in within three months. In 2015 Ecoppia agreed to retrofit the larger 40 MW Ketura plant as well.

The solar field at Kibbutz Ketura in Israel's Arava desert, where Ecoppia robots took over cleaning. Photo: Arava Power Company / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

Why trackers and rooftops are getting their own robots

Utility robots have spread since then, and solar hardware makers now sell their own. On September 24, 2026, TrinaTracker, the tracker business of Trina Solar, launched two robots in Changzhou, China. AURORA is a cleaning robot built for unattended, repeated cleaning of module rows. BUILDEX installs modules, using AI vision to place each one, a job we covered in our post on solar panel installation robots. TrinaTracker said manual cleaning is limited by terrain, weather, labor and safety, which makes it hard to run across very large plants.

A worker brushes dust off panels at a solar farm, 2017. Photo: Deo photographer / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Homes and commercial roofs are getting robots too. On October 1, 2026, TaiyangNews reported that China's BayRobot had introduced the H1 Pro for residential and commercial systems. It weighs 23 kg, sweeps with two roller brushes, cleans up to 1,000 square meters an hour and runs for up to 4.5 hours before returning to a dock that charges it wirelessly from its own solar panel. It finds its way with ultrasonic and laser sensors plus satellite positioning that BayRobot rates at 10 mm, and it works dry on slopes up to 16 degrees.

A rotating brush head on a pole cleans a ground mounted array in Dornbirn, Austria. Photo: Asurnipal / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB does not make cleaning robots. Its robots work earlier in the life of a panel, in the factories that build modules. ABB's solar brochure describes the IRB 360 FlexPicker sorting and loading wafers and cells at more than 150 picks a minute, and larger arms with more than three meters of reach handling whole modules. Absolicon in Sweden uses ABB robots on its solar collector line, and our post on solar module manufacturing covers that side. These cells are usually planned in RobotStudio first, so the path of every pick and press is checked before the line runs.

An ABB robot with a vacuum gripper for lifting solar modules, from ABB's solar production brochure. Photo: ABB

What solar cleaning fleets still need

The next few years will bring more autonomy. Cleaning robots on trackers can be told when to run using weather forecasts and output data, so a dust storm triggers an extra pass and a rainy week skips one. Ecoppia was already feeding weather data into its schedules in 2015. For homes, the BayRobot style of machine that lives on the roof and charges itself may suit flat commercial roofs better than steep tiled ones. Snow, pollen in spring and bird droppings are still harder to shift than dry dust, and they often need water.

A girl sweeps snow off a panel at a new solar plant in Balcombe, England, 2015. Photo: Oliver Rudkin / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Fleets are the open question for big plants. A site with thousands of rows needs robots that move between rows, report faults and get repaired without a crew walking every row. ABB's Flexley Mover AMRs navigate factory floors with Visual SLAM, and their fleet software is the kind of thing a solar operator would want outdoors. Nobody sells a mobile ABB arm that swaps brushes or batteries on cleaning robots, though the parts to build one exist. ABB's SafeMove zones would matter wherever people and moving machines share a site.

ABB's Flexley Mover P604 moves loads around a plant without fixed tracks. Photo: ABB

Cost decides most of this. A robot per row is expensive, and its price has to come back as extra power, which depends on how dirty a site gets and what electricity sells for. Robots also need care: brushes wear, batteries age and sand gets into bearings. For homeowners the safety case is strongest, because a robot on the roof means nobody climbs up with a hose. The plants that clean least today, in dry, dusty places far from water, have the most to gain from waterless robots.

An ABB robot on Absolicon's solar collector line in Sweden. Photo: ABB

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