TALOS sends its final newsletter today, on the project’s last day. It is shorter on news than the previous editions and longer on links, which is the point of it.
Three sets of documents sit at the centre of the issue, all of them free to download from the Resources section of the website. The policy brief, Autonomous Robotics for Solar PV Maintenance: Removing Barriers to Scale, sets out for EU and national policymakers why autonomous maintenance is not yet scaling across Europe’s solar fleet, and what would have to change in classification, liability, permitting, financing and standards for it to do so. The six technical briefs describe the TALOS method at each of the three pilots, one pair per site: briefs 1, 3 and 5 on the platform, written for operators, asset managers and plant owners, and briefs 2, 4 and 6 on the robots and the software behind them, for robotics providers and technology partners. The three training frameworks walk end users through the platform and the machines at their own site, and were written for the teams who use them rather than for the people who built them.
The newsletter also looks back at the two days in Lisbon that closed the project. The final General Assembly on 23 September brought the partners together to present three years of work. The Final Event the following day, at EDP’s headquarters, opened that work to the wider solar community, with two roundtables, the robotics and AI solutions, the Open Call results and an afternoon session setting the pilot data against the commitments made in 2023. Plant performance rose 28.7% at the floating plant on the Alqueva reservoir and 12.6% at the land-based plant near Ávila, and in the AgriPV orchard at Randwijk the robot’s fruit counts came within 92.5% to 98.4% of the growers’ own hand counts.
TALOS closes today, three years after it began. The website, the briefs and the training materials stay online, and info@talosproject.eu remains the way to reach the consortium.
