One operator, one button: Xpanner's robot arm now lifts solar panels so crews don't have to

Key points

• Xpanner Global launched the X1 Panel Lift system on 14 July 2025, adding automated panel lifting to its existing excavator kit.
• The system reduces a typical ten-person manual installation crew to three workers.
• One operator with roughly one to two hours of training can run the machine by pressing a single button.
• Xpanner has raised a total of $38 million in funding, including an $18 million Series B bridge round closed in May 2025.
• The kit works as a retrofit, meaning contractors can attach it to excavators they already own rather than buying new machines.

Solar farms are enormous. A utility-scale site, the kind that powers tens of thousands of homes, might need workers to carry and position hundreds of thousands of heavy panels by hand. It is slow, back-breaking work, and the solar industry is running short of people willing to do it.

Xpanner Global, a construction-robotics startup based in Santa Fe Springs, California, thinks it has a fix.

The company this week released the X1 Panel Lift, a kit that bolts onto a standard excavator and turns it into an automated panel-lifting machine. The excavator's arm picks up a solar panel using a suction device, swings it into position over the mounting frame, and places it precisely, all triggered by one button press from an operator standing nearby.

Panel bolting still happens by hand. So the recommended crew is three people: one operator running the machine, and one worker on each side fastening panels to the frame as the arm delivers them. Compare that to the ten-person crews that manual installation typically needs, and the labour saving is immediate.

"Solar installation has long been held back by its dependence on large skilled crews and complex equipment setups," said Henri Lee, Xpanner's co-founder and chief executive. "One machine, one button, one workflow, any operator can run it from Day 1."

The brains of the system is a controller Xpanner calls Mango. It pulls data from three sensor types at once: lidar (a laser-based distance scanner), ordinary cameras, and GNSS (satellite positioning, the same technology as GPS). Mango blends those three data streams to build a live three-dimensional map of the jobsite, so the arm knows exactly where each panel needs to go even as ground conditions shift across a sprawling field.

Does the excavator brand matter?

No. The X1 Panel Lift is a retrofit kit, meaning Xpanner's hardware attaches to whatever excavator a contractor already owns. The company told The Robot Report that brand and model are irrelevant; the kit simply wraps around the base machine.

That matters for cost. Contractors avoid a multi-hundred-thousand-dollar equipment purchase and instead pay a single subscription that covers the hardware kit, software licence, a monitoring dashboard called Xpanner Connect, and on-site field support.

Xpanner Connect also functions as a digital twin, a live digital copy of the physical site that updates in real time as panels go down. Project managers can watch installation progress from anywhere, which helps avoid the expensive schedule overruns that plague large solar builds.

Training takes one to two hours. The system was previously used for driving the steel piles that anchor solar panel rows into the ground, and Xpanner says the same kit will handle additional tasks through software updates rather than new hardware purchases.

Founded in 2020, the company employs teams in California and Seoul, South Korea. The United States remains its primary market.