Novel Design of a Hybrid Drone System for Cleaning Solar Panels

Distributed small solar power units are highly utilized in sustainable life applications, such as in street solar light, water pumping, cell phone towers, advertising signs, and residential household applications. The dust accumulated on the surface of these small solar panels decreases their overall power efficiency. However, the available robot or automated solutions for cleaning solar panels are more suitable for solar farms. In this paper, a novel design of a portable robot system for cleaning distributed solar panels is developed. The solution is based on a hybrid drone that rolls on the entire solar panel surface for cleaning and flying from one unit to another. Experimental evaluations provided the ability of the proposed prototype to travel along the entire cleaning path with a slight deviation. The demonstrated results showed the capability of deploying the developed solution for cleaning distributed solar panels.