1A1-R08 Autonomous Maintenance System for Mega Solar Power Plants : Design of Failure Inspection Robot

Abstract

After the great east earthquake and tsunami on 11, March 2011, people's faith on nuclear power plants was completely broken and has been shifted to renewable power resources. To addition to this, the government announced that surplus energies are bought entirely. Therefore, a lot of large scaled solar power plants called as mega-solar power plants, have been built in every place. Because a mega-solar power plant contain an extremely lot of solar panels, its maintenance and inspection requires many manpower resources. In this study, to reduce manpower resources on the mega-solar power plant, an autonomous maintenance system is proposed. The system consists with mobile robots, infrastructures for inspection and a control server. Mobile robots, which are commanded by the control server, inspect solar panels coordinating infrastructures. In this paper, a concept of the system and a design of a mobile robot are proposed.