Thomas Ricker
Here’s the robot building Amazon’s solar farms.
AES has given its Atlas solar robot some AWS smarts and redubbed it “Maximo.” It helped complete an Amazon-backed solar farm in Louisiana and is now moving on to Bellefield, California, home of the largest solar-plus-storage project in the US. According to Amazon, it can “reduce solar installation timelines and costs by as much 50 percent:”
Besides automating heavy lifting, Maximo can also perform in nearly any weather or lighting condition, which is especially useful for the Bellefield project, which is located in a sandy desert area known for extreme heat. Once Maximo arrives there later this year, the robot will work alongside crews to lift hundreds of heavy solar panels into place.
