India is aiming at becoming the world leader in solarpower generation. It plans to achieve a capacity of more than 100 Gigawatt by 2022, looking to increase it further to 300 Gigawatt by 2030. Solar Plants in-stalled will require a large amount of water to clean them if traditional methods are used. It will not only reduce the shelf life of solar panels but also decrease productivity. Eco Impulse is a tech-based startup that has come up with a solution to this problem. They provide their clients with safe, reliable, and automated cleaning robots.

AkshatVyas, Founder & CEO, Eco Impulse, says, "Eco Impulse is an innovative start-up. We started this journey with a vision to make renewable energy accessible and more reliable. To cater this vision, we have initiated a product line to impact the solar industry by transforming pre-adopted methods and processes currently used to maintain these solar plants. Our ecopreneurs team develops customized AI-enabled autonomous cleaning solutions that help solar plant owners clean and remove dust from the solar panels and achieve peak performance.

The cleaning primarily takes place without water. Currently, most of the cleaning operations are labour intensive and have no management of cleaning cycles. This increases O&M cost, further reducing ROI. Our tech-based innovation and automated solutions tend to reduce all of these factors, giving a complete optimized cleaning process."

Automated Solution for Cleaning Solar Panels
The primary target of the robots, developed

by Eco Impulse, is to reduce water wastage and increase the over-all work output. The company has vowed to raise the bar in the industry. Eco Impulse is the only start-up whose robots have certificates from Tier 1 manufacturers and installers too. This allows it to impact its clients that the robots are safe, and cause no harm to the solar panels.

Mrunal Patel Co-founder & CTO says, “Our robots operate in both semi-automatic and automatic mode. If our robots operate in semi-automatic mode, they can clean more than 2MW of Solar Plant within 6 to 8 hours. It can work at an inclination angle of 0 to more than 45 degrees, requiring no extra infrastructure saving the installation cost. It can auto-align itself; it is modular and its weight is under the threshold limit of the solar panel. It is dust and splash proof; it can work under various weather and geographical conditions and it requires very little maintenance.”

The feature loaded robot by Eco Impulse provides remote management where robot's operations can be managed from anywhere, such as scheduling of cleaning cycles. Eco Impulse is also developing predictive maintenance algorithm where the robot will notify about any damaged parts. Then there is web tracking where the clients can track different parameters of the robotsuch as number of panels cleaned.

Eco Impulse is the only start-up whose robots have certificates from Tier 1 manufacturers and installers acknowledging that robots are safe and cause no harm to the solar panels.

Ravi Vaghela, Co-founder & COO adds, "Customising our robots and meeting clients' demand is key focus of Eco Impulse. We do site visits to better understand site-conditions and customer requirements and then provide complete solution as a product. We also provide consultancy to our clients to optimize the overall solar plant installation, hence reducing their efforts and cost for further Operation and Maintenance of their site.

Towards a Bright Future
Smit Shah, Co-founder & CMO, says, "Currently, we are targeting a wider aspect of market that is industrial roof-top-and ground-mounted solar plants. Also, we wish to target multiple market segments that includes residential installations and we will be creating multiple variants of our products so that we can reach out to various solar plants, hence saving more energy and water."

Recognitions & Achievements
"Eco Impulse has been selected and recognized for incubation at AIC GUSEC under Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) setup by NITI Aayog Government of India. They also got selected for acceleration at IA-India Accelerator which is the only Global Accelerator Network (GAN) partnered accelerator in India. Eco Impulse is also part of top 20 startups of Clarion Call 4.0, The flag-ship business contest event of the IIM Calcutta Alumni Association (IIMCAA)."