Autonomous Robots in the Field: Enhancing Solar Farm Safety and Efficiency

Posted on Friday 25 July 2025

Solar farms are part of our renewable energy future, with the UK government pledging to triple solar power by 2030. Ranging in size from a few hectares to several hundred, these installations have historically relied on manual inspection as the standard approach - but as the scale of our solar infrastructure grows, this approach is becoming rapidly unsustainable. 

To meet this challenge, autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) are increasingly being deployed to navigate, inspect, and monitor solar farms, ensuring panels operate safely and efficiently. When working in such close proximity to humans, it is critical that these robots operate safely, and can continue to do so in the face of ever-changing real world conditions.

Ensuring safe operation for maximum efficiency

In solar farm operations, there are several factors contributing to potential dangers. For example, the electrical components in the photovoltaic (PV) modules can overheat, vegetation growth around the panels can become dry and flammable, and panel frames can corrode, leading to structural failures, fire risk, and the possibility of accidents.  However, safety is also an economic concern; to ensure maximum solar energy profitability and efficiency. From an economic perspective, the accumulation of dirt, dust, sand, or moss on PV modules reduces their energy performance by up to 85%. 

Accurate inspection, predictive maintenance, and efficient cleaning of panels is critical for the safety, long-term operational efficiency, and economic profitability of solar farms. Our research into developing an autonomous robotics platform will help fulfil these requirements, leading to a safer and more robust solar energy industry.

Creating fit-for-purpose AMRs

In this research project, our primary focus is on the safety assurance of the solar farm, the robots and the maintenance personnel. We considered potential options for monitoring and management of our in-house ISA solar farm testbed, and evaluated the pros and cons of each option with a focus on efficiency and assuring safety. 

For example, while small aerial drones offer a quick, relatively inexpensive solution for general overviews, they lack the ground-level detail we need for comprehensive inspection and fault detection, and cannot collect data in adverse weather such as wind. Similarly, whilst legged robots can provide detailed analyses and can navigate over uneven ground and obstacles such as small rocks they are complex to maintain, less energy efficient than wheeled robots and are much slower in operation. 

For rigorous and detailed inspections and monitoring, we need AMRs to provide detailed and accurate data so we can identify dirt, hotspots, shadows, weeds, corrosion and to provide crucial safety assessments. By integrating advanced AI and ML with data from a range of sensors: 

• our AMRs can collect extensive sensor data;
• they can process these data to understand the environment, navigate, inspect, and detect or predict faults;
• and then use the data to decide the best action to take. 

However, although AMRs offer distinct advantages, operating with little or no oversight in safety-critical environments like solar farms can introduce new hazards. Identifying these hazards and their impacts, and mitigating the hazards is the focus of our research. The hazards include potential system failures, whether hardware or software-related, which can lead to electrical hazards such as arcing or overheating. Additional concerns involve unanticipated robot behaviours, including erratic movements, becoming immobilised or overturning on uneven terrain, and the risk of collisions with infrastructure or, more critically, with people. The likelihood of such incidents increases significantly when robots operate in close proximity to human workers. While robots and humans working together on solar farm maintenance may seem relatively low-stakes, collaboration needs careful consideration to be both safe and ethical.

Developing a use case for solar farm safety assurance

Our work is developing robust safety assurance mechanisms and thorough validation processes to argue the reliability of these autonomous robots in dynamic, real-world environments. Our robots will adhere to stringent safety standards and regulatory frameworks to ensure risks are reduced as low as reasonably practicable (ALARP).   

By developing a use case using our own on-site solar farm, we aim to demonstrate that  we can safely use AMRs for accurate inspections, to trigger timely cleaning and maintenance to improve energy efficiency, to reduce fire risk, to predict where structural repairs are needed, and to extend the lifespans of panels.

In part two we’ll be delving deeper into our safety assurance work, looking at safe robotic operation, the reliability of sensors, how to deal with real-world challenges and the functional and ethical considerations of humans and robots working together on solar farms.