MIT-based startup launches solar construction robotic system

Charge Robotics partnered with Solv Energy to pilot a portable factory system intended to make solar installations safer and more efficient for increasingly challenging terrain.

March 17, 2025 Rachel Metea

Since partnering with Solv Energy to develop the prototype, Charge Robotics has raised $22 million for its first commercial deployments

Image: Charge Robotics

Charge Robotics announced it successfully deployed Sunrise, the company’s solar construction robotics system. Sunrise is a fully automated solar construction system designed to assemble, and install solar-tracking hardware.

Founded by alumni from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2021, the company says it is aiming to accelerate the transition to renewables by automating the most labor-intensive parts of construction. The automated technology assists construction crews with solar hardware assembly by eliminating or reducing tedious, laborious or unsafe manual operations.

The system autonomously assembles parts into completed solar bays, conducts quality control using advanced computer vision, and performs ﬁeld installations. Its mobile factories can be deployed to the site of projects where solar equipment including tracks, mounting brackets and panels are fed into the system and assembled into a so-called solar bay. Each bay, representing a 40-foot section of the solar farm and weighing around 800 pounds, is then put into place by an automated robotic vehicle.

Charge Robotics partnered with Solv Energy in a pilot project that began one year ago after discussing the concept beginning in 2022, Justin Joyce, Solv Energy’s director of technology and innovation, told pv magazine USA.

Since partnering with Solv Energy to develop the prototype, Charge Robotics has raised $22 million for its first commercial deployments, scheduled for later this year. The company says it recently has been making the system faster and easier to operate.

Many of the kinks the pilot project worked out were able to be fixed on the spot or the next day, Joyce said. For example, one such challenge was with the last module. “The last module is actually supported by a piece that cannot be installed in the factory,” Joyce said, but we didn’t realize that until we were in the field.

To solve this, Joyce said Charge Robotics 3D printed a piece to support the module temporarily while it is being transported from the factory to the piles where it is going to be installed. “And then once you’re once you’ve got installed, that piece comes out,” Joyce said.

Installing in challenging locations is increasingly becoming more difficult. Overall, this was the hardest challenge Solv and Charge Robotics had to overcome. The pilot was conducted during the winter and “it was kind of desert conditions,” Joyce said. “It was very cold in the morning, and it may swing to 40 degrees [F] by the end of the day,” which Joyce said had consequences on the equipment used to secure the torque tube.

“Locations have always been challenging,” Joyce said. As land suitable for solar installations inevitably becomes scarcer due to factors such as population growth and developments, installers are journeying further from civilization.

Solar installations are spreading across the country and getting bigger, Joyce explained, “and as a result of getting bigger, they’re covering more land, so we have more terrain challenges,” he said. “They’re not all built on previously used farmland anymore, so we’re presented with new terrain challenges.”

As developers continue to be met with more challenging locations, new technology is a value add, Joyce said.

As for whether the robotic technology will replace installation workers, Joyce said that in most cases, it won’t. Joyce described the employment market and any alleged worker shortage in solar installation as “sort of a mixed bag” that varies by different parts of the country. As solar sites inevitably expand into more remote areas, Joyce said there becomes a stronger need for the technology.

Eric Valleton, Solv’s chief technology officer told pv magazine USA, “It really isn’t much skill opportunity for the current workforce, but there’s new skill sets that need to be learned on how to use this machinery and understand how it works.”

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