Accelerating Solar Energy Research More Sustainably

The process of bringing new materials to solar panels can be full of repetitive tasks, evaluations, and risk. It requires a researcher to prepare a sample and then go through multiple steps to test each sample using different instruments — a process that is both time consuming and requires a lot of electricity. Researchers at North Carolina State University have created RoboMapper, a robot capable of conducting experiments more efficiently and sustainably to develop a range of new semiconductor materials with desirable attributes.