FTC Solar, Inc., a leading provider of solar tracker systems, software, and engineering services, hosted its inaugural Robo Day at the company’s ASTAAR training facility in Seguin, Texas, bringing together robotics companies, EPCs, developers, and technology partners to explore how automation can support the next phase of utility-scale solar construction.
The event featured live demonstrations from leading robotic and autonomous solutions providers, including Aonics, BotCrew, Civ Robotics, Cosmic Robotics, Libra Robotics, Ozzies, Inc., and RoboForce. Together, the participating companies showcased their solutions across multiple phases of PV construction, including pile marking, cable pulling, material staging, and module mounting.
FTC Solar hosted the event to highlight a growing reality in the solar industry: as projects become larger, more complex, and more schedule-driven, construction teams need better tools to build safely, efficiently, and predictably.
“A lot of our projects are in remote areas, difficult places to build, sometimes an hour or two just to get to the site,” said Rob Turner, Vice President – Construction at MasTec. “With limited labor, we have to keep looking for ways to create a safe environment where everyone goes home at the end of the day, while also building quality and productivity into the job.”
FTC Solar’s Robo Day brought together attendees from more than 20 EPC and developer organizations, creating a field-based environment where participants could see emerging construction technologies in action. Demonstrations showed how autonomous solutions can assist with repetitive, physically demanding, or precision-based tasks while allowing crews to focus on supervision, quality, coordination, and decision-making.
“People remain at the core of everything we do,” said Anthony Carroll, President and CEO of FTC Solar. “Robotics is not about replacing the skilled teams who build solar projects. It is about giving them better tools, helping them work more safely, and enabling them to build more efficiently. The future of solar construction will be shaped by people and technology working together.”
Robo Day also reinforced the importance of tracker design in enabling future construction workflows. FTC Solar’s 1P Pioneer® tracker platform is designed around constructability, with an easy-to-install architecture, flexible installation sequencing, and low training requirements. These features are intended to support today’s field crews while also creating a more repeatable foundation for automation-enabled installation.
“Construction automation is the only way to scale solar and meet the growing demands of the industry,” said James Emerick, Co-Founder and CEO of Cosmic Robotics. “It starts with tracker designs like FTC’s 1P Pioneer that enable both robotic and human crews to work faster, safer, and with greater throughput. The 1P Pioneer tracker is thoughtfully engineered for automation – features like the Slide-and-Glide module interface and the separation of rail and module installation steps make it an ideal platform for high-speed robotic installation and the next generation of solar construction.”
As utility-scale solar continues to scale globally, the ability to build projects with greater speed, safety, and predictability will become increasingly important. FTC Solar believes the future of solar construction will depend on collaboration between human expertise, smarter tracker design, and automation technologies that make field execution more efficient and more repeatable.
Robo Day marked an important milestone in that direction, bringing the solar construction ecosystem together to demonstrate what is possible when people, robotics, and tracker technology work side by side.
To learn more about FTC Solar’s smarter tracker solutions, please contact : info@ftcsolar.com or visit .
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