Experimental Studies on Solar Panel Cleaning Task by a Foldable Robot Arm of a Drone

This paper presents experimental studies of a solar panel cleaning task using a drone manipulator. The drone arm is designed to be foldable and lightweight for easy transport by the drone. A flexure mechanism was used to suppress vibration in a cleaning device attached to the end-effector of the drone arm. The foldable robot arm of the drone was implemented and uses hybrid force control to regulate contact force on a solar panel for the efficient cleaning task. Clustering algorithms were used to classify the groups to be cleaned for the efficient cleaning. Experimental studies of the cleaning solar panel with the foldable arm with a flexure system were conducted.