Cooperative Robot System for Fault Diagnosis of Solar Panels at Mega Solar Power Plant

—Design of Wire Suspension Manipulator for Positioning of Probe—

Abstract

After the great East Japan earthquake, explosions at TEPCO Fukushima 1st nuclear power plant and planned power outages change an attitude to power generation. As a result, a lot of large scaled solar power plants termed Mega-solar has been built. To maintain solar panels, inspection of a fault solar panel is important. However, previous methods to find a fault solar panel require removal of panels from the power plant and large manpower. In this study, automatic inspection system for solar panels utilizing multiple robots is proposed. The system consists of cooperative multiple robots, which have a wire-parallel mechanism for positioning an object or a sensor-prove on a surface of a solar panel. For realization of on-site inspection, a cooperative robot system using wire-parallel mechanism is proposed in this paper. Furthermore, based on vector closure and manipulability, a method to optimize a design of a manipulator using the genetic algorithm is described.