Across India’s sun-baked solar parks, a quiet enemy steals power every single day: dust. A thin film of it settles on millions of panels, and every speck trims the electricity a panel can make. Cleaning it off the old way takes something India can ill afford in its driest districts — water, four to five litres for every single panel. That is the problem a Noida startup set out to solve, and its answer now rolls across solar farms from Gujarat to Maharashtra: a robot that cleans panels with no water at all, powered only by the sun it protects.
Skilancer Solar’s robots are already at work in more than 2,500 installations across the country, the company says, saving over 100 million litres of water along the way. Its customers read like a roll call of Indian energy: Adani, ReNew Power, Tata Power, NTPC, Avaada and O2 Power.
A robot that needs nothing but the sun
The flagship SS-01 is fully autonomous. It deploys from its dock every day on its own, sweeps the panel rows, and returns to recharge — from a small solar panel built into its own body, feeding heavy-duty LFP batteries. The company says the robot needs no power infrastructure from the plant at all, and it talks directly to the plant’s SCADA system for scheduling, status reports and remote monitoring.
The cleaning itself is deliberately gentle. Ultra-soft PBT spiral brushes sweep the dust away with gravity doing the rest, protecting the panels’ anti-reflective coatings. The robot is rail-guided, so it puts no dead load on the glass, climbs slopes of up to 25 degrees, and is built to keep working through the harshest Indian summers — IP65 sealed, C4-class anti-corrosion protection, and rated for temperatures up to 70°C. Sensors on board decide how many passes a row needs in a day, sense rain and skip cleaning while it falls, and watch the battery so the robot never stops mid-row.
Skilancer Solar’s cleaning robots on the panel rows at O2 Power’s 25 MW plant in Georai, Maharashtra. Image: Skilancer Solar.
From a final-year project to 105 MW plants
The robot began as a final-year project. Neeraj Kumar, then a student at IIT Jodhpur, built a machine to clean solar panels — and realised the idea was much bigger than a college project. He teamed up with Manish Kumar Das, an instrumentation engineer with a decade of business-development experience, and the two founded Skilancer Solar in 2017. The startup was incubated at IIM Lucknow’s Enterprise Incubation Centre and backed by Alfa Ventures and Venture Catalysts.
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It took the partners a year to build their first prototype, and early customers were cautious about a new machine rolling across expensive panels. The robots won them over by working. A 2020 profile counted 280 robots installed across six states; the company’s own tally today stands at more than 2,500, serving over 80 clients. The deployments now span the full scale of Indian solar: ReNew Power’s 105 MW plant at Patan in Gujarat, Avaada’s 100 MW tracker plant at Yavatmal in Maharashtra, O2 Power’s 25 MW array at Georai, Adani’s 3 MW facility at Hazira Port in Surat, and a 1 MW rooftop array at Mantralayam in Andhra Pradesh.
A Skilancer Solar robot at work on ReNew Power’s 105 MW plant in Patan, Gujarat. Image: Skilancer Solar.
The inspector that sees heat
Skilancer’s newest machine does more than clean. The SS-AI inspection robot carries FLIR thermal sensors and AI cameras that scan for hotspots, micro-cracks and dust levels while it works, generating diagnostic logs for the plant operator. A lighter manual variant, the SS-Manual, covers rooftops and small decentralised installations where a single technician can carry the robot by hand.
See the robots at work:
Why it matters
India is building toward 500 GW of renewable capacity, and most of it will be solar — much of it in the dry, dusty regions where water is scarcest. A single 1 MW plant holds around 3,000 panels, and every one of them needs regular cleaning to hold its output. Skilancer’s robots turn that chore into a daily, automatic routine that uses no water, no grid power and no climbing crews — just sunlight, soft brushes and a machine that never gets tired.
It is a small, elegant piece of Indian engineering solving a very Indian problem: how to keep the country’s clean-energy harvest at full strength in a land where every litre of water counts. One clean panel at a time, the robots are making sure the sun India catches is the sun India keeps.
Keep reading: More Miles From the Same Battery: Inside Epsilon’s Epsil, the Silicon-Graphite Anode Built in India · Not a Drop of Water: Inside Solavio’s Robots Cleaning India’s Solar Farms · More Energy & Power stories
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