The effective implementation of Photovoltaic (PV) systems relies heavily on controlled testing using Photovoltaic Emulator (PVE). This paper presents a novel PVE for rapid and robust testing of PV systems. A fifteen segments linearization (FSL) methodology is put-forward to resolve the nonlinear current-voltage (I-V) equations of PV modules. The I-V curve is precisely segmented into 15 linear elements, whose coordinates are used to construct a suitable reference voltage for the PVE. To ensure a robust and fast emulation of the solar panel, a nonlinear power stage controller (NPSC) is designed to maximize the Buck converter-power stage of the PVE. Several experiments have been performed under diverse environmental and load testing profiles, revealing a mean error and maximum error of less than 0.2 %, and less than 0.6 % respectively for three classes of commercial PV modules (multicrystal KC200GT, poly-crystalline MSX-60, and mono-crystalline CS6K-280 M). The high computation accuracy of the FSL position the proposed PVE as a simple but powerful emulation tool for PV systems. By evaluating its performance and comparing it to the state-of-the-art emulators, this paper aims to demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the FSL-NPSC-PVE in achieving rapid and robust emulation of different commercial solar panels.