The Solar Cell Discovery Machine

With the aid of crystals known as perovskites, solar cells are increasingly breaking records in how well they convert sunlight to electricity. Now a new automated system could make those records fall even faster. North Carolina State University’s RoboMapper can analyze how well perovskites might perform in solar cells, using roughly one-tenth to one-fiftieth the time, cost, and energy of either manual labor or previous robotic platforms, its inventors say.