Design and Experiment of Four-side Stretch Slingbased Solar Cleaning Robot

Maintaining a power capacity of solar cell is the main goal for utilizing solar power system. Most problems in solar power system are dirt, e.g. dust, sand, animals, pollen and crops burning. These challenges have a huge impact for power capacity of solar cell. In general, the cleaning method for solar panels is the human power, cleaning mops, and imported solar cleaning robot. This paper presents the design of four-side stretch sling-based solar cleaning robot. In this research, a robot used in processes of cleaning solar panels especially for a large area solar panel. The concept design of the robot is to create a robot which has a simple installation, flexible in configurations, decrease a number of worker and operating cost. The robot is equipped with spiral roller brushes, so that the robot is implemented with a water sprinkle in order to clean the panels everywhere it moves through. In this design, a sling-based system contains a length measurement unit and embedded control schemes in order to drive a movement accurately and to localize the positions of the robot. The installation is attached to the four corners of the solar panels. The possible range of width for the solar panel is between 2 and 4 meters. The robot is tested with the releasing and pulling processes of sling wire at the same time in order to evaluate the accuracy of the device. Then, the robot is controlled for moving to different positions in the working area of 4 x 4 square meters. The robot is also adjusted to correct the position based on the values that derived from the equation of motion of the robot. The testing results showed that the robot can move to various position with the precision level between 95% and 99% through a manual control with a radio-frequency remote control. Tentative targeted applications for this cleaning robot include a rooftop solar panels, solar farm, and solar floating panels.