The robot solar chef: an AI platform that watches solar films form in milliseconds reaches 24.4% efficiency

Making a great solar cell is a little like baking: the film has to form just so, and until now researchers judged the result only after it came out of the oven. A University of Osaka team led by Ryosuke Kado, with senior author Akinori Saeki, has built a robot platform that watches the cooking happen — cameras and sensors capture the film's colour changes in less than a second and the motion of solvent droplets in milliseconds, while the robot adjusts the recipe. The material in question is perovskite, a cheap, printable crystal tipped as solar's next big thing. Guided by the platform's data, the team produced a device converting 24.4% of sunlight into electricity. The study, published in the journal ACS Nano, points toward solar films designed by machines that can see what human eyes cannot.

SDG 9 · Industry, innovation and infrastructure — Mechanism: tech innovation