ABB Robots and the Race to Build Solar Faster

From hand-bolted panels to robot-built solar farms: how ABB robots speed up solar module production and where rooftop installs on homes could go next.

INDUSTRIAL ROBOTICS

Chat With Robot

9/23/20261 min read

For most of solar power's history, people placed every panel by hand. Crews carried 20-kilo modules across fields or up ladders, lined them up on racks and bolted them down one at a time. Factories worked much the same way, with people soldering cells, laying glass and gluing frames at workbenches.

Workers in hard hats and harnesses on a roof with a lift during a solar panel installation

A crew works on a solar array at Wayne National Forest, Ohio, in 2009. Photo: Wayne National Forest / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Factories changed first. In Härnösand, Sweden, Absolicon worked with ABB to automate its solar collector line, and two ABB robots now finish a collector every six minutes. The old manual method managed about three a day. Five people run the whole line.

White ABB industrial robot arm working over a curved solar collector trough

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

Robots are now reaching the fields too. On August 29, Cosmic Robotics joined Y Combinator with Cosmic-1, a 10,000-pound machine whose arm sets a 90-pound panel every 30 to 40 seconds on solar farms and data center sites. AES says its Maximo robot has already installed 100 MW in California.

Rows of empty metal solar mounting racks beyond a green field

Empty racks wait for panels on a solar farm under construction. Photo: Philip Halling / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

ABB robots do the heavy lifting in the factories that feed these sites. In Chur, Switzerland, dhp technology uses an ABB IRB 6700-150 with suction cups to pick photovoltaic modules and bond them to folding-roof frames. Bigger arms such as the IRB 7600 can reach more than three meters to handle full-size modules.

Large ABB robot holding a solar module with a suction gripper in a factory cell

An ABB IRB 6700 lifts a solar module for a folding roof at dhp technology. Photo: ABB

Those folding roofs now shade clarifier tanks at Swiss wastewater plants and fold away in bad weather. Any large site can borrow the idea: build and test the panel assembly in a robot cell, then ship it ready to mount, so the crew on site has less to do.

Aerial view of a folding solar panel roof spanning wastewater treatment basins

A folding solar roof over wastewater tanks in Chur, Switzerland. Photo: ABB

Rooftops on houses are harder, because installs there still mean people climbing scaffolding with heavy panels. A lighter robot, for example an ABB GoFa cobot on a lift, could hold a panel in place while the installer fixes it down. I'd expect that to cut injuries first and speed second.

Three installers placing black solar panels on an orange tiled house roof

Installers fit solar panels on a house roof in Sweden. Photo: W.carter / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

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