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 10 to 50 times less time, cost, and energy than either manual labor or previous robotic platforms, its inventors say.The most common solar cells use silicon to