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About us

Since 2010, our team has been engaged in research and development for the solar power industry. A few years ago, a bright idea occurred to our CEO while out inspecting our outdoor solar module testing facility. It was a beautiful, sunny day but the modules were underperforming due to a light rain that had left a layer of dust on everything.

Even though Barcelona is far from the deserts of North Africa, we often receive rain that leaves a visible layer of dust on our solar panels. Bringing out the squeegee yet again, our CEO asked himself “Isn’t there a better, faster way to get this done?” Fast forward to the present day and we see that bright idea becoming reality. With small drones that have the intelligence to detect soiling problems and clean them autonomously, Cleandrone is helping solar installations – big and small – maintain their potential. We are a technology company launching a suite of products that will make manual glass cleaning a thing of the past.

 

Ricard PardellFounder, Chief Executive Officer

Ricard is an experienced technology entrepreneur and former software executive. He currently holds CEO and CTO roles in Cleandrone, leading the company’s commercial and technology development. He has 30 years of experience in the IT industry, including roles as Business Unit Leader at Atos Origin and Country Manager at Aspective. Ricard holds 7 patents to his name. He was founder, CEO and CTO of Sol3g, a CPV startup, which was sold to Abengoa (NASDAQ: ABGB) in 2010. He is Chairman of Valldoreix Greenpower, a renewable energy engineering incubator. He studied Economics and Business Administration in the University of Barcelona.

John WhitenChief Operations Officer

John leads the commercial and operations team at Cleandrone, being also our chief drone pilot. He set up Ethical Solar during the dawn of the UK solar industry. In just over a year he grew it to a team of 40, plus 2 franchises, installing 7 systems a day and winning the UK’s Regen SW installer of the year, demonstrating extraordinary commercial and organizational skills. He is also an experienced civilian airline pilot, having flown all manor of heavy jet airliners across the world. This places him in an exceptional position to tackle the international commercial and regulatory challenges of delivering our cutting edge technology to market.

Diego MuñozFounder, Head of Robotics

Diego is the lead robotics engineer, developing detection, tracking, localization and navigation algorithms for autonomous flight systems. He holds a Masters in Industrial Engineering from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. He also holds a Master’s degree in Robotics and Automation from the same university. His research has covered various topics related to robot learning and computer vision in drones.

Robert GuàrdiaElectronics Engineer

Robert is an industrial engineer who gained his master’s degree from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, where he specialized in electronics. He spent a year at University of Liege, Belgium, as part of the ERASMUS program. Robert´s dissertation reviewed the state of the art in 3D head pose recognition using depth detection cameras and developed novel computer vision algorithms for those applications.

David FernándezArtificial Intelligence and Deep Learning

David has a master in Space Science and Technology through Julius-Maximilians-University, Wurzburg, Germany, Lulea University of Technology, Kiruna, Sweden and Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland, and a degree on Software Engineering by Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, and has a long experience as software engineer in companies like Softare A.G. and Ibermatica. He is an specialist in artificial intelligence and deep learning and is also very keen to lead our software quality effort based on UML.

Nick O’BrienUK Operations Manager

Nick is an experienced professional in the Solar and Environmental Services industries. He has worked as a consultant in Environmental Services and was previously Director of Ethical Solar Leeds. He is responsible for implementing Cleandrone’s UK strategy and all aspects of the day to day operation of Cleandrone in the UK, whilst also supporting the executive team in global and UK strategy development. He is a graduate of Bangor University and has an MSc from Heriot Watt University.

Hector AcedoFlight Technician

Hector is a licensed drone pilot and flight technician. Within Cleandrone, he is responsible for controlled flight tests in our indoor and outdoor testing facilities and provides feedback on flight performance to our engineering teams. He is a graduate of technical training programs at Censolar.

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