Robotics company Luminous will receive $4.9 million in funding as the first recipient of ARENA’s $100 million Solar ScaleUp Challenge, which sought to supercharge innovation and crowdsource ideas from around the world on how to reduce the cost of large-scale solar.
Luminous’ project will introduce and demonstrate their LUMI robot—an AI-powered pick-and-place technology designed to streamline utility scale solar construction. LUMI addresses one of the industry’s most labour-intensive tasks: panel installation.
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LUMI autonomously places solar modules onto racking structures, allowing onsite workers to complete the final securing process, reducing manual labour and improving installation speed, safety and cost-efficiency.
Luminous hopes the LUMI robot will enhance productivity and safety on Australian solar farms by helping the existing workforce to install solar panels up to three-and-a-half times faster, without any need for heavy lifting. While LUMI has already demonstrated cost reductions on solar farms in the US, the ARENA project marks the first global deployment of a full fleet of five LUMI robots, unlocking the potential to lower solar farm costs by up to 6.2%.
Luminous has partnered with Equans, a global engineering, procurement and construction firm, to deploy LUMI at two Australian solar farms: the 440MWp Neoen Culcairn Solar Farm in New South Wales; and the 250MW Engie Goorambat East Solar Farm in Victoria.
Luminous CEO Jay M. Wong said, “With LUMI, we’re not just introducing a robot—we’re setting out to redefine the standard for how solar farms are built and help sites energise faster and safer. Deploying our LUMI fleet in Australia will allow us to capture the data, performance insights and real-world impact needed to drive global adoption—the kind of scale and transformation we founded Luminous to achieve.”
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The project continues ARENA’s support of Australian innovation in the solar PV industry. ARENA has provided over $388 million to over 200 solar research and development projects since 2009 through funding programs inherited from the Australian Solar Institute or delivered by ARENA since 2012.
