How Luminous Accelerated Robotic Fleet Manufacturing in Australia with Quarter20

Overview

Luminous Robotics is a Boston-based company that builds autonomous systems that place solar panels onto racking structures, automating one of the most labor-intensive steps in solar farm construction. For its first international deployment at the Goorambat East Solar Farm (GESF) in Victoria, Australia, Luminous faced a challenge: assembling and verifying its LUMI S4 robotic fleet under an aggressive timeline, nearly 10,000 miles from its engineering headquarters. Managing a project of this scale on static PowerPoint decks or spreadsheets wasn’t an option.

The Challenge

It is not easy building a robot capable of withstanding the environmental and load requirements of solar panel installation. Each LUMI S4 robot contains thousands of parts organized into dozens of sub assemblies.  Ensuring accurate, safe, and repeatable builds required crystal-clear instructions and flawless collaboration between teams separated by a 14-hour time difference. The team knew that traditional documentation and scattered files would quickly lead to confusion, version errors, and costly rework. They needed a live, connected source of truth that could keep engineering, manufacturing, and field operations perfectly aligned.

“We knew that good work instructions would be critical to the success of the project, since the time change meant that mistakes could extend downtime from hours to days,” said Roman Lilligren, Manufacturing & Assembly Manager at Luminous.

“Visually-based instructions were our best chance to successfully onboard a growing, remote team, but 2D drawings wouldn’t provide enough clarity. Using Quarter20 meant that we could generate clear visuals and push changes as often as needed to ensure the team always worked with the latest information.” 

The Quarter20 Solution

With Quarter20, Luminous’s updates and communication can now happen seamlessly across continents. When CAD or process changes occur, Luminous engineers in Boston can push them directly into Quarter20, ensuring the assembly team in Australia can wake up to the latest instructions. No delays, no retraining, and no need for team members to fly back and forth to support changes on-site.

The result: Luminous achieved consistency across multiple units, reduced rework, and maintained full traceability through final commissioning.

Luminous’ Successful Deployment

Using Quarter20, Luminous completed the on-site assembly and validation of its LUMI S4 fleet efficiently allowing them to ship and finish panel installation ahead of schedule on the 500,000+ panel GESF. They demonstrated how data-connected documentation can enable faster, more consistent deployments of complex robotic systems, anywhere in the world. With Quarter20, Luminous isn’t just building robots faster. They’re building a repeatable blueprint for scalable, global hardware operations.

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