Meet Maximo, the robot who installs solar panels

The renewables developer AES has added a new tool to its belt, one that it expects will tackle massive solar installations in record time. 

The company’s new robot, powered by artificial intelligence, will make its debut at the company’s two-gigawatt Bellefield project in California — the largest solar-plus-storage project in the U.S.

• The top line: Maximo, as AES has dubbed its robotic “friend in the field,” will help the company build out up to 5 gigawatts of its solar backlog and pipeline in the next three years. The robot is designed to halve both cost and installation time for the developer.
• The nuts and bolts: Developing and testing Maximo was a multi-year program, with the first prototype commissioned during the COVID-19 pandemic. The robot leverages AI-powered computer vision to determine panel placement, and uses generative AI to reconstruct images obscured by glare or other issues.
• The current take: According to Deise Yumi Asami, Maximo founder at AES, one of the major benefits of the robot is its potential to solve labor-related bottlenecks facing the solar industry. Maximo “enables teams to install solar modules faster and more efficiently, supporting more MWs to be installed with the same amount of people,” Asami told Latitude Media. “Maximo handles the heavy lifting which enables construction teams to prioritize other necessary project tasks”

Maximo can also work “around the clock and in extreme weather conditions,” Asami added. The robot is designed to be operated by two people: one to drive the robot, and another to monitor and control its movements, which Asami described as “user-friendly.”

To date, Maximo has already installed nearly 10 megawatts of solar, and AES is on track to install 10 times as much by next year. The robot helped to install the 200-MW Oak Ridge Solar project in Louisiana, its first utility-scale project assist, and has also worked on projects in California, New York, Ohio, and Virginia.

Those smaller deployments offered opportunities for testing consistency and performance across varying weather and land conditions, Asami said.

“Another key consideration was to ensure Maximo had full exposure to a full-blown construction environment,” she added. “Louisiana and Virginia in particular were pivotal to learning how to streamline logistics and overall operations with the robot to deliver MW-scale projects.”

Maximo’s deployment comes at a time of massive demand for electricity, in part to support a rise in AI and data centers. AES itself is one of the largest suppliers of clean energy to hyperscalers, with more than seven gigawatts of renewables projects either in operation or under construction for those companies this year.

“Innovations like [Maximo] will be fundamental for accelerating our ability to bring projects online faster and with greater efficiency,” AES president and CEO Andrés Gluski said in a statement.