The robot, developed by German engineer Bernd Brodbeck and Kiener Maschinenbau, a manufacturer of automated industrial systems, is a tool to build solar power plants rather than operate them.

FORBES: How Robots Are Making Solar Power Cheaper

The robot aircraft, known as aerosondes, are the brainchildren of an engineer called Tad McGeer and are being developed in a collaboration between the Insitu Group, a firm based in White Salmon, Washington State, and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.

ECONOMIST: Robots in the cockpit

If needed, staff in a control centre can see and hear everything the field engineer is seeing and hearing via the camera and microphone mounted on the robot arm.

BBC: IBM's robot sidekick aims to aid field engineers

After visiting the oil spill in June 2010, the young engineer decided to leave MIT in Boston to develop an open source oil spill cleaning robot, Protei.

CNN: Robotic sailboats built to clean up oil spills

"This is the first time any robot has drilled in any rock on Mars" or anywhere else beyond Earth, said Louise Jandura, chief engineer for Curiosity's sample system at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

WSJ: Rover on Mars Extracts First Rock-Core Sample