LEAPTING launches a self-driving forklift robot for solar farm construction

A big solar farm is built from many thousands of panels. They arrive on pallets, sit in a storage area called a laydown yard, and then have to travel to each row where they get installed.

Today that usually means a person driving a forklift, often with a second person, a flagman, walking ahead to guide it. LEAPTING says its Auto-Navigation Forklift Robot, or AFR, does the trip alone. The company calls it "the missing link" in moving solar materials around a site.

Why it matters: at the launch, panelists from LEAPTING, Jinko Solar, DNV and Solarabic talked about labor shortages, rising labor costs and harsh desert sites. Those are the problems LEAPTING says its robots are built to solve.

Here are the main numbers, from LEAPTING's announcement and the datasheet details PV Magazine and TaiyangNews reported:

The robot weighs 5,500 kg on its own, so it is heavier than the biggest load it carries.

It moves at about walking pace. On a site where safety matters more than speed, that is the point.

The AFR combines three ways of seeing the world, LEAPTING says:

• GPS-RTK: satellite positioning, corrected in real time, so the robot knows where it is on the site down to a small margin.
• Laser SLAM: a laser scanner that maps the area around the robot and keeps its position accurate up close.
• 3D computer vision: cameras that find each pallet, its angle and the exact spot of the fork holes.

From there, the robot plans how to slide its forks in and pull the pallet out, and adjusts its mast and forks to match. PV Magazine reports it can also tell whether a pallet is loaded, and recognize common European (EUR/EPAL) and Japanese (JIS) pallet standards.

It is a bit like a self-parking car that also has to pick up a 3-ton box at the end of the parking spot.

In real life Picture the last time you tried to slide a hand truck under a heavy box without looking. Now picture doing it with a 3,000 kg pallet, in the sand, all day. The AFR does the looking for you.

Operators are not locked out. Besides full autonomy, the AFR has a semi-automatic mode and a manual remote-control mode, according to PV Magazine and TaiyangNews.

That is what the tracks are for. Instead of wheels, the AFR rides on engineering-grade steel tracks, like a small tank. LEAPTING says they suit desert sand, gravel, mud and steep slopes, with low pressure on the ground.

Two separately driven 4 kW motors power the tracks, PV Magazine reports. Electrek puts the total at about 10 horsepower. Because each track runs on its own, the machine can turn on the spot.

The rest of the toughness list:

• Weather: IP67 protection, which means it is sealed against dust and can handle being dunked in water.
• Water crossings: up to 0.3 m deep, PV Magazine reports.
• Slopes: besides the 30-degree climbing rating, the datasheet lists a maximum forward tilt of 4 degrees and a maximum pitch of 11 degrees, PV Magazine reports.
• Charging: automatic charging, or manual fast charging on 220 V or 380 V power.

PV Magazine lists an operating range of -10 C to 50 C, and a storage range of -20 C to 60 C. That matters on sites in the Gulf, where LEAPTING held the launch.

A driverless 5.5-ton machine has to know when to stop. LEAPTING lists several layers:

• Eyes all around: multi-line LiDAR sensors watch 360 degrees for obstacles.
• Warnings: sound and light signals as it moves.
• Brakes: three tiers, electronic, mechanical and parking.
• Big red buttons: emergency stops at several points on the outside.
• Tilt sensor: an inertial measurement unit tracks how far the machine leans and stops it with an alarm if it passes a set limit.

The pitch is simple: no driver in the seat and no flagman walking in front of a loaded forklift.

The AFR is the newest member of a family of solar robots, all run by one cloud software platform, LEAPTING says. It covers both building a solar farm and keeping it running:

• AFR (forklift): moves pallets from the yard to the rows.
• MMR (mounting robot): places panels on trackers every 40 seconds, which LEAPTING says is 3 to 5 times faster than people, with under 1 mm of error.
• G2 (cleaning robot): drives between rows without rails.
• G1 (row cleaner): a self-powered, water-free cleaner that sits on the rows. LEAPTING says it boosts power output by 5 to 15%.
• MIR (inspection robot): patrols with regular and thermal cameras, and uses AI to map panel defects into a digital twin, a virtual copy of the plant.

So the forklift is the link between the truck and the mounting robot. Robots building things on their own is a growing trend: we covered autonomous construction fleets earlier this month.

LEAPTING is a Chinese company, founded in 2022 in Shanghai, with factories in Huzhou and another site in China. It builds robots only for the solar industry.

By the numbers: LEAPTING says its technology has been used on more than 15 GW of projects worldwide. It says it has shipped over 10,000 robots and runs a 24/7 service network across the Middle East, Australia, Europe, India, the Americas and Africa.

In September, it received the RE Robotics Technology Leader Award at the Solarabic Saudi Awards 2026 in Riyadh, the company says. At the Dubai launch, it gave partnership awards to regional partners including OMAS and Kabbani Construction Group.

The catch: LEAPTING has not shared a price or delivery dates for the AFR in its launch materials, and the speed and accuracy figures come from the company.

• If you work on solar construction: a driverless forklift that handles sand, mud and slopes could take one of the riskiest jobs on site away from people.
• If you follow robotics: this is the kind of robot that spreads fastest. It does one boring, heavy job in one kind of place, very well.
• If you pay an electricity bill: cheaper and faster solar construction is one of the many small pieces that shape what new solar power costs.