Solar Panel Cleaner

Residential solar installations get dirty and lose efficiency. Existing cleaning solutions are either expensive water-based systems or manual labor.

Senior capstone: design and build a working cleaner targeted at residential installs, on a budget, in 4 months.

Two-axis gantry that scales to 10×10 m installations:

• Cleaner subassembly rides an extruded aluminum rail providing left-right motion. Two brushes plus a squeegee — agitate, then remove contaminants. No water.
• Slider subassembly rides perpendicular rails to give up-down motion. Combined, the head can reach anywhere inside the gantry.

The design held a hard-line on cost and modularity — the rails extend, the head doesn't change.

Ran for 9 hours straight without failure at the University of Maryland 2023 Design Day demo.

Won the Linda Schmidt Innovation Award.

Total parts cost: $350.

• Constraint forces creativity. The $500 cap pushed us toward extrusion + off-the-shelf bearings instead of the custom CNC structure we initially sketched. The result was lighter and easier to repair.
• Designing for a Demo Day deadline is a useful proxy for designing for a customer install — both reward modular subassemblies the team can swap if one is broken on the day.