Cosmic Robotics — 2024–2025
Documenting the Future of Solar Construction
Starting in 2024, we followed Cosmic Robotics across California job sites — capturing the early trials of autonomous solar installation before the world knew what they were building.
The Company
Cosmic Robotics is building the machines that the solar industry has needed for years. Utility-scale solar panels can weigh up to 90 pounds each — and for decades, installing them has meant long days of brutal manual labor under open sky, often in extreme heat. That's the problem James Emerick and Lewis Jones set out to solve.
Their answer is the Cosmic-1A: an autonomous, all-electric mobile robot that combines an industrial manipulator arm with a rugged all-terrain drivetrain. It places panels onto racking with ±1mm precision — one every 30 to 40 seconds — without tiring. At its core runs Particle, Cosmic's domain-specific AI platform, built to make real-time decisions on the job site: automating QA, tracking assets, and routing workflows so crews stay moving.
Emerick came to the problem with deep roots in field-deployed construction automation — work at Built Robotics and Autodesk Research gave him an intimate understanding of what it takes to get hardware to actually perform on a live job site, not just a lab floor. Jones, as CTO, helped launch the world's first 3D-printed rocket at Relativity Space. They're the kind of founders who have already shipped hard things.
Act I — Arvin, CA
The first time we worked with Cosmic, the robot was still proving itself. The site was in Arvin — a small agricultural town southeast of Bakersfield in the Central Valley — where Cosmic had partnered with Sunstall's SunRobi division on one of their earliest real-world deployments. Sunstall was one of the first solar EPC contractors willing to take a bet on integrating autonomous installation into a live project.
This was pre-seed territory. The footage from Arvin captures that tension — a prototype robot working alongside a real crew on a real deadline, in the kind of environment that breaks things. Dry valley heat. Uneven terrain. A team figuring out, in real time, how human and machine workflows mesh together. We were there to document it honestly: the scale of the field, the physicality of the work, the precision of the machine.
Act II — Patterson, CA
The second round of shoots, in Patterson, showed how much had changed. The operation was more developed — the crew more fluid, the robot more refined, the whole system better understood. Patterson sits in the western Central Valley, closer to the Bay Area, and the job site there reflected a company now moving with more confidence.
These shoots were more expansive. We were capturing imagery and video Cosmic would use across their website, investor materials, and media outreach — the kind of content that had to work equally well as a single frame in a deck or as the opening shot of a pitch video. That meant shooting in golden-hour light where we could, finding angles that conveyed both the scale of the installation and the precision of the machine, and staying close enough to the robot and crew to make the technology feel real rather than abstract.
The goal was never to make it look like a tech demo. We wanted it to feel like something was actually being built.
What We Delivered
Across both projects, the brief was the same: capture the work as it actually happens and produce content that serves multiple channels without feeling like it was made for any one of them. That meant pre-production planning, on-site direction and logistics, and full post — color, edit, delivery.
- Pre-Production & Logistics
- On-Site Direction & Cinematography
- Photography
- Color Grade & Editing
- Investor Deck Assets
- Website Imagery
Over the last couple years, we've had the pleasure of collaborating with Sebastian on multiple projects for Cosmic Robotics. From pre-production logistics to on-site shoots, editing, and delivery — he's consistently organized, prepared, and ready to execute. He brings strong creative instincts to everything he touches, and is genuinely collaborative and open to feedback without ever losing his own creative voice. Reliable, talented, and low-drama. A combination that's hard to find and extremely valuable.
— James Emerick, Co-founder & CEO, Cosmic Robotics
