Prototyping a Rebar-Driving Robot for Utility-Scale Solar

The challenge

Our client, a utility-scale solar construction company, has to drive thousands of steel stakes into hard desert ground on every project, and doing it by hand is slow and labor-intensive. The company set out to automate the job with a purpose-built robot. While it set up its own R&D operation, it needed an experienced hardware team that could start immediately.

What we did

We assembled a team of engineers in the Bay Area within weeks and set up a working lab alongside the client's team. We studied design options for the machine and judged them on performance and on manufacturability at fleet scale. We led the hands-on electronics and sensor work, supported mechatronic design through early bench prototypes, and set up the software and simulation needed to develop the robot's behavior. Workstreams ran in parallel and changed direction quickly as priorities shifted, which is typical of early robotics development.

The result

We helped the client get its early hardware effort off the ground, then transitioned the work to its growing in-house engineering team.

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