Development of an autonomous wheeled robot for efficient photovoltaic panel cleaning

Cleaning tasks are widely considered one of the mostrelevant applications in the robotics field. This results from thesubstitution of human workers with robots in basic and variousapplications for cleaning tasks like houses, hospitals, industries,etc. Currently, cleaning photovoltaic (PV) panels are getting greatattention in industry sectors because the industrial applicationsuse the solar panel as an electrical power source. Therefore, asignificant engineering challenge in a PV power generation iscleaning the PV panels, as the accumulation of dust and dirt ontheir surface reduces the performance of the PV system. The coreconcept of this work is to propose a navigation method based onthe control points algorithm for wheeled mobile robots to dealwith path planning. Then, a genetic algorithm is used to overcometwo main problems of optimization, which are: the optimizationof control points and the optimization of mobile robot trajectory,therefore, finding the optimal path. Furthermore, a robust controlstrategy known as sliding mode control is introduced to ensurethe stabilization of an autonomous mobile robot while followinga desired trajectory. Finally, simulation results are presented todemonstrate the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed method.