Latest / Clean Power Hour / Luminous Robotics Lumi 4: Faster Solar at 30% Lower Cost #339

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Luminous Robotics Lumi 4: Faster Solar at 30% Lower Cost #339 · Clean Power Hour

• 0:51
  Jay Wong: So something interesting that we've learned over the past two quarters or so was we actually went and had this thing validated by a third party engineering firm el tested. So it turns out that when you install panels robotically, there is a 16 to 20% reduction in like micro cracks and defects as well. So interesting value proposition there that we've we've learned over the past couple months,
• 1:18
  intro: the clean energy industry is moving fast. The deals are getting bigger, the technology is evolving, and the stakes have never been higher. Welcome to the Clean Power Hour, the podcast for solar storage and micro grid professionals who want to stay ahead of it all each week, your host, Tim Montague, industry advisor and president of clean power consulting group brings you unfiltered conversations with the leaders actually building the energy transition. Now here's your host, Tim Montague,
• 1:52
  Tim Montague: we're here with Jay Wong, CEO of luminous robotics, and it is awesome to see how the bot has evolved year over year. But from your perspective, Jay, what is this event about, and why are things going so well?
• 2:08
  Jay Wong: This event is about us coming together, really innovating at speed. You know, I think last year, we had just released Lumi series three, right around this time, and we learned a lot from that. You know, we've repackaged a robot completely from the ground up, redesigned it. Was able to ship these robots, you know, halfway across the world, to Australia, installed 1000s and 1000s of panels. You know, we've touched ground on almost a gigawatt worth of projects now, you know, installing, you know, many, many megawatts of those gigawatt projects. And we, today, we just released a new capability, you know, we started off installing panels. We've now been able to do like inspection as well, in the O and M phase with ground AGB type of folks without the arm, and one of the robots behind us is now able to do material staging, so picking up the entire palette of modules and coordinate with installation robot.
• 3:06
  Tim Montague: Yeah. So the Lumi four now has a buddy pallet Lumi, right? And, and that's the perfect combo, right? You want the the palette to be autonomous as well. And it makes perfect sense. I was talking with Charles a little bit earlier, and you know, it sounds like you'll have more palette bots, maybe then even the installation robot, right?
• 3:30
  Jay Wong: Yeah, exactly the way we've been seeing this. It's really not just about robotics and automation, it's about Lean process optimization, right? I think there's a lot of number of solutions that kind of take different angles at this approach. Now what we've gravitated towards is being able to maximize the installation speed, but then think about, how do you maximize the product delivery, you know, to that installation robot, right? So initially, we're working with a skid steer, right? Skid Steer will go and pick up the pallet and coordinate with our robot and traverse down the row. Some solutions we've seen in the space will try to, like, bring the the forklifts solution to the robot arm, and have this kind of embodied solution. It turns out, when you do that, the entire system just gets really large, and you start thinking about like mobilization, traverse ability of the site.
• 4:21
  Jay Wong: You know, this is the only robot that can sneak underneath all the torque tubes. That's really valuable when you know random things will happen on the site, you might have to skip rows, come back later, type of thing, so really makes us Agile to different site conditions. And number two is we're able to think about more of this Lean process optimization so that you can coordinate product coming to the robot and get really close to these kind of fixed automation, factory type of approaches.
• 4:50
  Tim Montague: Can we do a quick tour around the bot? Yeah, for sure. Okay, great. Tell us what we're looking at.
• 4:55
  Jay Wong: So we built and designed these robots in house in Boston. We're standing in one of the warehouses, 12,000 square feet. You know, we have about six cameras on the robot.
• 5:07
  Jay Wong: There's four surrounding it. In the front, it does RGB D, which is like it does color, and then it gets depth information as well. So it basically sees the world in this 3d colorized space. There's also two additional cameras on the end effector. So, you know, we do course estimation. The robot can manipulate things, and as it's going close, we do some more advanced computer vision to really get precise. We have a stubly Robotics arm here. Stubli is one of the market leaders in the solar cable connector space, and we've been working really closely with them to kind of build this robot for solar construction. We've designed and built this mechanism in house.
• 5:49
  Jay Wong: So we actually have two patents on this. Is that is the only solution in the industry that can pick panels up from the front. It can pick panels up from the back, and also understand how to orient the electrical leads. So that's super important, right? Like, we've heard all these crazy stories about construction crews just throwing panels up onto the racks, and all the electrical leads are pointing the wrong way, and you had to bring them all that back down. Rework, you know? Oh, my God, we've spent a lot
• 6:14
  Tim Montague: of time. What about safety? Because I think, you know, here I am. I'm a worker. Okay, I have a hard hat on, but this thing is obviously at head height. How do you how do you make sure that the robots not going to bump into a human?
• 6:29
  Jay Wong: So we have a number of AI algorithms running on the robot, on all the sensing capabilities. So during this demo, you might have seen it one of our VPS walking around with the robot. Once you get sufficiently close, the robot actually stop and kill power to some of the subsystems. So we've spent a lot of time making sure that
• 6:50
  Tim Montague: if there's a person too close to it, exactly, Yep, got it cool. And what's the tell us about the the platform in terms of run time? It's, it's all electric, or,
• 7:03
  Jay Wong: yep, exactly, the full robot is about 30 kilowatt hours. So we can run about a full shift 10 to 15 hours, depending on the topography and the terrain, and it's been pretty rugged, ruggedized, right? So we've shipped this robot in really cold temperatures as well as, like, super hot Australian heat. So that was really fun to learn through and really productize the system
• 7:30
  Tim Montague: and tell us about market adoption here in the US.
• 7:32
  Tim Montague: How's that going?
• 7:33
  Jay Wong: It's been going great.
• 7:33
  Jay Wong: We have a large amount of customers and partners in our open house today, some really great you know, power providers, EPCs, mechanical installers, are all very, very interested. So for us, you we also went and basically reproductive ties, how we go to market and how we offer the system. So, you know, we're doing a type of cent per watt, type of model where customers can instantly see, you know, 20 to 30% cost reduction day one off the bat.
• 8:03
  Tim Montague: And is the basic model robotics as a service.
• 8:06
  Tim Montague: Exactly? Yep, exactly. I like that, because then you don't have to worry about upgrades, right? As a customer, somebody else is maintaining the robot.
• 8:14
  Tim Montague: You're just paying for it to be there and functional, and then it's going to get better and better over time. What other considerations, I guess, when you're when you're talking to prospects, what is the value proposition? The basic value proposition of the Lumi, today versus yesterday with all manpower?
• 8:34
  Jay Wong: Yeah, I think the big thing is, you know, speed accuracy and then cost reduction, right? So those are really important. I think when you talk to mechanical installers, when you talk to EPCs and even IPPS, something interesting that we've learned over the past two quarters or so was we actually went and had this thing validated by a third party engineering firm, el tested. So it turns out that when you install panels robotically, there is a 16 to 20% reduction in like micro cracks and defects as well. So interesting value proposition there that we've we've learned over the past couple months,
• 9:11
  Tim Montague: yeah, nice solar panels are expensive. They're the most expensive part of a solar array. So if you can have less breakage, that's a good thing. Exactly what else should our listeners know? Jay and congratulations on the new product release today, and just the progress I'm just this is so beautiful and and such such an improvement year over year. So congrats on that progress. And the whole Australian takeoff, it just seems like you're really taking off. Yeah.
• 9:40
  Jay Wong: Thank you, Tim. It's been wild, wild ride. It's quite chaotic, but it's been fun.
• 9:46
  Tim Montague: And where can our listeners find you?
• 9:49
  Jay Wong: We're all over LinkedIn. So look up luminous luminous robotics. We also post a lot of fun YouTube videos, so kind of check it out every couple of weeks and connect with me on LinkedIn. JM Wong on LinkedIn. Awesome.
• 10:03
  Tim Montague: The Clean Power Hour is brought to you by CPS America, maker of North America's number one three phase string inverter with over 10 gigawatts shipped in the US. The CPS product lineup includes string inverters ranging from 25 kW to 350 kW, their flagship inverter, the CPS 350 KW is designed to work with solar plants ranging from two megawatts to two gigawatts. CPS is the world's most bankable inverter brand, and is America's number one choice for solar plants now offering solutions for commercial utility ESS and balance of system requirements go to Chintpowersystems.com or call 855584, 7168, to find out more. It's just a great pleasure to welcome Andy Klump, back to the show. Welcome. It's great to see you.
• 11:00
  Andy Klump: Andy, absolutely.
• 11:00
  Andy Klump: Tim, it's great to be here, and it's fun to be back in the US for a change.
• 11:04
  Tim Montague: I think of solar as a as a little bit of a double edge. On one hand, change is a constant. The technology is constantly evolving, and we're riding the solar coaster. The economy that we work in is changing. It's a very dynamic landscape, but it's also construction, and construction companies like to find things that are tried and true. Solar modules are very mature technology. Sure there's innovation happening. The the efficiency of solar panels is increasing. We're integrating, you know, new technologies into solar panels, perovskites, for example. But when you when you say, it's great to see innovation happening, what are you referring to?
• 11:50
  Andy Klump: I Well, one very tangible example is what I saw luminous from robotics yesterday. With Yourself, we're happy to see robotics take a bigger role in the deployment of of these important systems.
• 12:01
  Andy Klump: They're the remain robot system.
• 12:06
  Andy Klump: Lumi is is now able to help support installation on much faster rates, and EPCs have to find ways to reduce costs, but they also have to find ways to use labor more efficiently, because there's going to be a shortage of labor. And we've seen so many developers who've safe harbored gigawatts and gigawatts of equipment, and we're going to have a big uptick in installations, 2728 but guess what? We're going to have a labor shortage. So unless you deploy robotics in a pretty large scale. There's a lot of these systems are not going to connect to the grid
• 12:35
  Tim Montague: that year. It was really great to see year over year, right? Because I was at that event last year with the Lumi three, and the Lumi four is a totally different animal. It's a much sleeker package. I look at that and I go, That's sexy. I want that on my construction site. And now they've got the palette Lumi, right? Yes, because you need more pallet delivery than you need the arm, right, right? And initially they were designing the forklift into the main robot, but it turns out logistically, that you need to have those devices separate Absolutely.
• 13:11
  Andy Klump: So that's cool, and, no, it's great. The form factor they've developed can work in many different trains, and now they've actually had a deployment in Australia, 250 megawatts. They've not had that size in the US yet, but they will. And so that's where a large utility scale developers and APCs need to see those type of partners out there. They've also added a little bit more horsepower to their management team. So JJ and Bob were great before, but it's great to see Charles Pimentel, longtime solar industry veteran, join as the CCO as well. Yeah.
• 13:42
  Tim Montague: Indeed, Charles is a great addition to the team. So I love that example of innovation, robotics, automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning, these are things that really can bring down the cost of solar, and it's both end like we we we need more qualified professionals in the industry we meet. We need more good EPCs, but we also need them to adopt better tools and technologies to install solar faster and make it cheaper. Hey guys, are you a residential solar installer doing light commercial but wanting to scale into large C&I solar? I'm Tim Montague. I've developed over 150 megawatts of commercial solar, and I've solved the problem that you're having you don't know what tools and technologies you need in order to successfully close 100 KW to megawatt scale projects.
• 14:35
  Tim Montague: I've developed a commercial solar accelerator to help installers exactly like you.
• 14:44
  Tim Montague: Just go to cleanpowerhour.com click on strategy and book a call today. It's totally free with no obligation. Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate you listening to the pod, and I'm Tim Montague, let's grow solar and storage. Go to clean power hour and click strategy today. Thanks so much.
• 15:04
  Tim Montague: Well, I could talk to you all day, but I think we'll leave it there. I look forward to doing a longer form interview with you in the near future. Thanks so much for checking in here at re plus Boston. Check out all of our content at cleanpowerhour.com. Please tell a friend about the show. That's the best thing you can do to help others find this content.
• 15:21
  Tim Montague: And Andy, how can people find you?
• 15:24
  Andy Klump: I'm always a regional on LinkedIn. I'm currently in the in between things, so taking a sabbatical.
• 15:29
  Andy Klump: But yeah, if you're in the Boston area, please let me know, but I generally on LinkedIn pretty much daily. So thank you very much.
• 15:35
  Tim Montague: I'm Tim Montague, let's grow solar and storage.
• 15:37
  Tim Montague: Thank you so much. Andy and.