Office of Research and Grants

Global Warming can be defined as the gradual increase in the temperature of the earth which leads to the changing of earth's climate. This change can can have many effects such as: increasing sea levels and floods caused by melting polar ice caps, more hurricanes and storms, some species will be extinct, and there will be no fresh water to drink [1]. One of the causes of this disaster is using sources of energy that are not environmentally friendly as they release harmful gases such as carbon dioxide. As a result, many countries nowadays are heading to use solar power as an alternative and clean source of energy to save the planet from global warming. However, with using this source of energy, there is a probability that large amount of energy is being lost due to the sun's movement during the day. This problem can affect the efficiency of the solar energy. To solve this problem, We decided to develop and build a system that tracks the movement of the sun and follow the direction of the sun. The concept of Sun Chaser Robot is similar to the sun flower which follows the sun's direction. Sun Chaser Robot can help in reducing the wasted solar energy by increasing the efficiency thus encouraging people to use solar energy as a main source of power. It is a tracker system that can detect the angle of the sun of the highest light intensity based on the fact that when an object faced the sun directly, it receives more heat. Then, it moves and rotates the solar panels toward this angle of sun light to get more power. The goal of Sun Chaser Robot is to take full advantage of the solar energy and maximizes the extracted sun power by moving the solar panels according to the movement of the sun instead of being fixed in one direction.

M. Al-Enezi, E. Al-Qattan and S. E. Esmaeili, "The Design of a Sun Chaser Robot Prototype," 2017 9th IEEE-GCC Conference and Exhibition (GCCCE), 2017, pp. 1-6, doi: 10.1109/IEEEGCC.2017.8448134.