This paper presents one application of industrial robots in the automation of renewable energy production. The robot supports remote performance monitoring and maintenance of salinity gradient solar ponds. The details of the design, setup and the use of the robot sampling station and the remote Data Acquisition (DAQ) system are given here. The use of a robot arm, to position equipment and sensors, provides accurate and reliable real time data needed for autonomous monitoring and control of this type of green energy production. Robot upgrade of solar ponds can be easily integrated with existing systems. Data logged by the proposed system can be remotely accessed, plotted and analysed. Thus the simultaneous and remote monitoring of a large scale network of ponds can be easily implemented. This provides a fully automated solution to the monitoring and control of green energy production operations, which can be used to provide heat and electricity to buildings. Remote real time monitoring will facilitate the setup and operations of several solar ponds around cities.
Online Forecasting of the Solar Energy Production
