About

TALOS addresses the challenges of the growing use of photovoltaics (PV) in Europe. The 3-year project seeks to enhance PV applications in line with energy needs and the European Union's sustainability goals.

Solar photovoltaic (PV) energy has grown exponentially thanks to technological developments and cost reductions. The REPowerEU plan aims to expand solar capacity in Europe to over 320GW by 2025 and nearly 600GW by 2030, fostering innovation for efficient, cost-effective construction and operation. By 2050, it is expected that 23% of the global energy demand will be produced by PV.

However, this expansion faces issues like lower power density compared to fossil fuels and increasing land-use conflicts.

TALOS solutions are designed to address key challenges in the PV and agricultural sectors, ensuring effective and efficient human-robot collaboration and adaptability to various scenarios.
These solutions are tailored to perform tasks like monitoring, inspection, cleaning, and vegetation management in all PV scenarios. The key innovation of TALOS lies in automating these operations and maintenance (O&M) tasks, which are currently performed by humans. By deploying fully autonomous solutions, such as drones for visual inspections, PV panel cleaners, and vegetation mowers, TALOS aims to enhance safety and reduce risk exposure for O&M workers. Additionally, this automation is expected to decrease the human effort required for crop monitoring by 90% in demonstration scenarios, thereby optimizing plant performance ratios by up to 10%.

The project will show the benefits of robotics, such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions (>450 tonnes/year), conserving resources (up to 35% water savings), minimizing operation and maintenance costs (up to 5%), and optimizing collaboration between humans and robots to enhance safety in risky environments.

Objectives

  1. Showcase advanced robotics in monitoring, operation, and maintenance.
    By integrating mission planning and AI recommendations across the three PV scenarios, the project will support onsite PV O&M technicians.

  2. Optimise collaboration between humans and robots.
    By introducing new features in User Interface platforms and recommendation engines, the project will assist operators in avoiding on-site, repetitive, and complex tasks, while de-risking operations through reduced human exposure to harsh environments.

  3. Enhance PV plant availability, reliability, and performance.
    Through AI models that identify and classify anomalies in multimodal data, the project is set to decrease O&M costs, facilitating proactive maintenance, and lowering the levelised cost of energy (LCoE).

  4. Tackle robotics challenges in the energy-food nexus within the expanding AgriPV application sector.
    This involves integrating energy and crop models into smart decision-support tools and demonstrating a comprehensive solution for crop inspection, health monitoring, and measuring key parameters alongside PV panel inspections.

  5. Provide environmental benefits through GHG emission reduction, water savings, and resource optimization.
    This leads to optimized monitoring and reduced operation and maintenance costs for both energy producers and farmers.

Expected outcomes

Design of a platform that enables collaborative mission planning and decision-making among multiple robots.

Development, by TALOS, of at least 5 robotics, AI, data solutions that will operate in 3 different scenarios (Land, FPV, AgriPV), and another 9 solutions by the Open Call.

Autonomous detection and prediction of faults, without human intervention.

Reduction of

  • 10%

    Underperformance

  • 5%

    O&M costs

  • <70%

    Maintenance period

  • 90%

    Human risk exposure

  • >450

    CO₂ emissions

Improving of

  • 10%

    Resource efficiency in O&M taks

Solutions

TALOS solutions will demonstrate the added value of robotics & AI in the PV and agriculture sectors. Adapting to different scenarios and users, these solutions prioritize high reactivity and responsiveness for effective collaboration between robots and humans.

  • Robotics deployment tools and human-robot collaborative environment

  • Robotised PV monitoring and inspection

  • Robotised land based PV O&M

  • Robotised floating PV O&M

  • Robotised agricultural monitoring and inspection

Discover more about TALOS solutions

Consortium

The TALOS consortium consists of 13 partners combining multidisciplinary competences and resources.

Fellow projects