The European TALOS project has completed three years of testing autonomous robots and AI for solar power plant maintenance, demonstrating the technology at sites in Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands.
Funded through Horizon Europe, TALOS has developed a system that monitors solar plants, identifies performance problems, determines which maintenance jobs are economically worthwhile and recommends them to a human operator.
Once approved, the platform can dispatch autonomous machines to perform tasks including inspection, cleaning and vegetation management. Results from completed jobs are automatically recorded and fed back into the system.
Rather than operating according to a fixed maintenance schedule, the platform uses production, weather and field data alongside a digital twin of the plant to identify losses and rank maintenance tasks according to their potential value.
Human control remains central to the system. Plant managers approve each proposed mission and can change its timing, location or assigned machine, while robots can be monitored and stopped remotely.
The technology has been demonstrated at three contrasting sites.
At two hybrid solar and wind facilities in Spain, six machines – including inspection drones, a configurable ground vehicle and a large-scale cleaning robot – work across sites totaling 56 MW.
At the 5 MW floating solar plant at Portugal’s Alqueva reservoir, a rail-mounted robot cleans panels while an uncrewed boat carries an inspection drone from shore.
At an agrivoltaic pear orchard in the Netherlands, a drone and ground robot operate alongside the solar installation, with the ground robot also monitoring trees and counting fruit for yield forecasts.
Across its pilot projects, TALOS targets reductions of up to 90 percent in human exposure to risk and more than 70 percent in maintenance windows, alongside approximately 5 percent lower operations and maintenance costs and up to 10 percent less lost production.
The project says one of the principal barriers to wider deployment is now regulation rather than technology, citing differing national rules, uncertain liability for autonomous systems and regulatory gaps surrounding technologies including floating solar and agrivoltaics.
