A Mobile Robot Design for Efficient and Large-Scale Solar Panel Cleaning

The surface cleaning of photovoltaic panel is an urgent industrial problem, for not only determining power conversion efficiency, but also possibly leading to permanent damage to photovoltaic panels. Cleaning robot is the most competitive solution for this problem. The reported cleaning robots can be classified into three categories, the on-board mobile robot, the wall-mounted cleaning robots, and vehicle-mounted mobile cleaning robots. Regarding large scale photovoltaic panel cleaning, a cleaning robot must be equipped with agile ability to move across panels to clean photovoltaic panels of different arrays. On-board mobile robots and wall-mounted cleaning robots have insufficient ability to move across panels of different arrays. Although traditional vehicle-mounted cleaning robots have the ability of panel-crossing, the use of internal combustion engines will cause pollution and require manual fueling. In this paper, we propose a fully electric-driven mobile cleaning robot design with autonomous navigation ability capable of working at large-scale photovoltaic power plants. We built up a cleaning robot prototype based on the design to validate cleaning effectiveness. Experiments well demonstrate that the proposed cleaning robot achieved unprecedented cleaning rate of over 99% with qualified repeatability.