Painting lines on football fields? That’s a job for robots now
Shaun Ilten had a problem. The main director of Turf and Gounds for the Galaxy and Dignity Health Sports Park had 26 full -size training grounds, two match fields and a warm -up field to line up the coachella Valley football tournament last winter. And he had less than five days to do so.
Since it takes three people almost two hours to lie down and paint limit lines on a single field, mathematics said that it was not going to get there.
“It is simply not possible to do everything by hand,” he said.
He therefore decided to jump the part of the hand and give the task to a few robots, which were able to compete and paint each field in about a quarter of the time that human hands would have needed. Without robots, the largest professional pre-season football event in the United States would necessarily have been much smaller.
“There would be no means that it was humanly possible,” said Ilten.
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What made the possible was a lawn tank, a GPS machine the size of a large beach cooler that can paint sports fields of any size for any sport. It was an original idea of Jason Aldridge, an entrepreneur based in Atlanta with a long story of use of technology to innovate workplaces, restaurants and telecommunications to shipping and sports.
The idea of using technology and robotics to relieve the guards of the chore of striped sports fields came to Aldridge about nine years ago, while watching the “Shark Tank” commercial reality television program with his son. It was, he said, an old ritual who needed a modern solution.
“Even at the Olympic Games in Ancient Greece, they are used to lining the tracks to manage sprints,” he said.
A look at the robot of the lawn tank to paint the lines of the field.
(Gracious Turf Tank)
Months later, he joined the Denmark developers, who four years earlier, had designed a robot prototype based on a similar concept, and in 2017, he said, he sold his first lawyers at the Sozo sports complex in Yakima, Washington, and the Commonwealth Soccerton in Lexington, Ky.
Since then, Turf Tank has become a company with more than 200 employees, tens of millions of dollars in annual sales and 5,000 customers, including San Diego FC, Galaxy, Lafc, Angel City, eight NFL teams and hundreds of colleges, including Pepperdine, California, UC Santa Barbara and Loyola Marymount. Turf Tank also designed the stylized logo on the field for the All-Star MLB game last month in Atlanta.
Two other Danish companies – Traqnology and Tinymobilebots, whose robots have marked more than 2 million fields worldwide, says the company – offer similar services, as is the Swiss company Swozi and the Fjdynamics of Singapore. But Turf Tank claims to be the dominant force on the American market.
The robots of the lawn tank, which weigh up to 132 pounds and can contain 5.3 gallons of paint, are controlled by a computer tablet and guided by GPS technology linked to a portable base station, which acts as a reference point. All that a user has to do is enter the dimensions of the field – the length of the key, the width of the field – in a tablet and the robot does the rest as little as 24 minutes.
The concept of autonomous robots was still a difficult sale for people used to doing things by hand and not on a keyboard. Although it looked like a good idea, most guards had to be convinced of the accuracy and reliability of the robots.
Aldridge tried to sell the University of Alabama on the technology of the Bryant-Denny stadium during a hot day in July. The lawn tank designed the horizontal and vertical lines without problem, but the director of the field crew was certain that he could not correspond to the precision and the precision necessary to paint hasd brands in the center of the football field. So Aldridge took him to lunch and when they returned, there were 160 perfect hatching brands, each four inches wide, two feet long and 60 feet of the touch.
The Alabama University, Aldridge said, now has three robots, two for athletics and one for intramural fields.
He also had more doubt than conviction at the start.
“I was skeptical when they contacted me for the first time, just because of how it works. Everything is GPS. If something goes on his way, will it become a thug? ” He said. “But they took it out, I made a demo and I measured the lines after that and they were in a centimeter.”
It was in 2019 and Ilten now has three robots at Dignity Health Sports Park he uses to align the main field of the football stadium, rugby and the butt and the surrounding training areas for football. (For Galaxy Games, he prefers to mark the old terrain, with a wheel roll roll, allowing him to use a thicker and brighter paint.)
“It makes everything a little more effective,” said Ilten, who manages 20 -year -old staff. “Instead of having two or three guys take an hour and half to line a field, I can send a guy and it takes 35-40 minutes.”
But most of Turf Tank customers do not come from professional teams or large university teams. The saving time provided by robots can change their life for high school guards and local park directors, who often have to align several fields in one day.
“It was a point of pain,” said Aldridge, 48. “They go to school to learn to cultivate grass. Painting a field was a part of the work that was not what they really wanted to do, but it was a huge necessity.
“It’s like the cherry on the cake, right?” Building a beautiful field is a bit there that our robots enter. ”
⚽ You have read the last episode of soccer with Kevin Baxter. The weekly column takes you behind the scenes and highlights unique stories. Listen to Baxter in the episode of this week of “Podcast Corner of the Galaxy.
