Self Driving Cars And Solar Panel Installing Robots — Our Relationship To Machines Is Complicated – CleanTechnica

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!

---

Yesterday, Zachary wrote about Waymo expanding to Miami. Today, Bloomberg contributor Ellen Huet writes about how its self-driving cars — which are really AI-enabled robots — are making some people angry enough to attack them. In San Francisco, where Waymo and Cruise have had self-driving cars in ride-hailing service for a while now, Huet says they have been smashed, set on fire, and had their tires slashed. Videos on social media show someone stomping on the windshield of a Waymo vehicle. As Waymo expands to more cities — Atlanta and Austin are said to be next — they will almost certainly be the targets of more vandalism.

“It got me wondering: What in our psychology drives people to attack robot cars?” Huel asks. In a sense, smashing windows is just the latest instance in a long tradition of attacking new technology the way the Luddites attacked machines in textile mills. In a more recent analog, protesters upset about gentrification in San Francisco in 2013 and 2014 staged elaborate stunts to blockade Google employee shuttle buses. They danced in front of them in clown suits and broke a window. Part of the answer, Huel suggests, is that they symbolize a real threat of job displacement. Waymo declined to comment. But as fears about artificial intelligence (AI) have grown in the last two years, people might be feeling ire toward Waymos simply because they’re existentially unsettling. “A lidar hatted alien in our midst,” Huel calls them

“Suddenly we have a new character we have to relate to that has some personality,” said Jo Ann Oravec, a professor of information technology at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater who studies rage against robots. “It’s the realization that something else is intelligent. Ryan Calo, a University of Washington law professor who studies robot ethics, told Huel the story of hitchBOT, a humanoid robot created in 2013 with one objective — to hitchhike across the US by relying on human aid. It safely hitchhiked across Canada and several European countries. But in 2015, when it tried to cross the US, it started in Boston and only made it as far as Philadelphia before someone decapitated it. Researchers designed the hitchBOT experiment to try to answer the question, “Can robots trust humans?” Huel has an answer. “Apparently not,” she says.

Planted Solar Uses AI Enabled Robots

This conversation about the interface between people and machines is especially relevant today, when artificial intelligence is increasing the human-like characteristics of robots. Nate Beckett is the co-founder of Planted Solar, a company that makes AI-enabled robots that install solar panels at large solar farms faster and cheaper than human workers can do. That is an interesting counterpoint to the mantra the Biden administration has been repeating about one of the benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act — new jobs in the cleantech industries. Beckett says the machine his company designed and built looks like an industrial toothpick dispenser with a nail gun attached to a bulldozer.

Planted Solar is building a fleet of those machines, which it says can revolutionize how the world builds solar farms. Rather than spitting out toothpicks or hammering nails, these robots dispense steel rods that solar panels sit on with high precision at a speed no human can match. They use artificial intelligence software that allows them to work on varied terrain, which saves more time and money by reducing the need to grade land. Planted Solar is one of a growing number of startups and solar developers turning to robots to quickly get more steel in the ground.

The need for speed is vital. Although the amount of solar capacity installed worldwide between 2022 and 2023 doubled, according to the International Energy Agency, that’s still too slow. To keep the climate within livable limits, the IEA estimates solar installation will have to double again to nearly 630 gigawatts annually by 2030. There are obstacles in the way of reaching that milestone, particularly around labor. While the US solar industry last year expanded at a record pace by adding more than 15,000 jobs, nearly 30 percent of solar companies said it remains “very difficult” to hire skilled workers, according to the latest survey by the nonprofit Interstate Renewable Energy Council (IREC).

The Planted Solar robotics and AI-assisted design offers a way forward. Using AI to help design solar installations allows customers to streamline solar array creation, cutting the number of components needed for construction, says CEO Eric Brown. Once the digital blueprint for a new project is ready, Planted Solar sends construction commands to robots that work around the clock in the field. The result, Brown said, is about a two thirds reduction in construction time. He says it typically takes a year to manually build a 100 megawatt solar project. Planted Solar expects to complete that same task in four months. For now, the company has only deployed its technology on small pilot projects. Its first megawatt-scale installation is scheduled to begin construction next year.

Robots And Solar

As the solar supply chain keeps evolving, one big automation question is to what extent robots — best at doing repetitive work — can keep up with rapid changes in the industry, and at what cost. “We are very far from seeing this being applied in significant volumes,” says Lara Hayim, who leads solar energy research at global intelligence firm BloombergNEF. Calling it a “niche market,” Hayim says the labor gap is narrowing and questions whether autonomous tools would remain appealing to construction companies once it closes.

But tech investors are increasingly interested in automating the energy transition. Planted Solar raised $20 million in Series A funding from Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Khosla Ventures. Built Robotics, another startup based in San Francisco that develops robots to prepare the ground for solar panel installation, has raised $114 million in venture money and counts Founders Fund and Tiger Global among its backers. Co-founder Noah Ready-Campbell grew up working in construction during his summer breaks and learned how demanding doing construction work can be. He co-founded Built in 2016 to ease the burden on construction workers with the help of autonomous machinery.

The company’s robots helped demolish part of an interstate highway along the West Coast, cleared land for new housing in California, and laid foundations for wind turbines throughout the Great Plains. But Built has since pivoted from being a robotic assistant to all industries to being laser-focused on solar construction. “It’s off the charts compared to other markets in terms of the scale, the repetitiveness of the work and the appetite from the customers,” he says.

The Takeaway

Older readers may remember when auto workers went on a rampage at GM’s newly revamped Lordstown factory in 1972. General Motors was the first US automakers to place a big bet on robots to build its cars, especially the Chevy Vega that was supposed to stem the tide of Japanese imports. (It didn’t.) When GM shuttered the factory in 2018, Quartz observed that in the winter of 1972, Lordstown workers rebelled against GM’s experiment with a bold new management style that put a premium on automation while treating assemblers as though they were little whirring parts of one giant machine.

Their uprising became a national symbol of blue collar disaffection. “Lordstown syndrome,” as the media dubbed it, was fueled by the idea that, for American society to thrive, people needed work, but more specifically meaningful work — a purpose that went beyond the simple act of fastening a spring to a Chevrolet’s left rear axle. In the national debate that ensued, America pondered how a society that neglected to treat work holistically would hurt the competitiveness of its workers, and, ultimately, the health of its communities.

There are a lot of moving pieces to this puzzle. First, although we all want more renewable energy, there is something a little odd about using AI-enabled robots to build solar farms that will be used primarily to power data centers that support more AI rather than actually powering homes and businesses. Second, if union workers were worried about the quality of the work experience in 1972, how do they feel about robots and AI taking over more and more tasks today? There used to be a band that called itself Rage Against The Machine. How prophetic.