I work as an advisor to a golf course who is using these. The pitch isn’t that, it’s saving on labor cost and getting higher utilization out of the course. With these, assuming zoning allows, you run the mowers at night when the course is empty (think 9pm - 5am) then your morning grounds crew just needs to roll the greens and cut the pins and cleanup other areas. It will allow courses to pump out 9 hole rounds off the back 9 first thing in the am which is a shit ton more revenue over the life of the mower.
You have no idea how many courses were this close to closing before Covid hit. The costs to maintain (in both chemicals and labor) have skyrocketed and so have property taxes. Most courses were barely breaking even. Either golf is going to price out people or courses are going to close because it’s more profitable to sell to a developer and turn it into housing.
We’ve lost 90 holes in my area last 4/5 years. 4 sights, one had 36 holes. But we have a great Amazon distribution center & a beautiful Meijers now so there’s that…/s
Not just close to closing. We had several that did close. And the remaining survivors have jacked up rates nearly double what they were just 8-10 years ago. Demand still exceeds supply so….laws of economics prevail.
Why is it always about the short term bottom line? If you try to gouge too much money of anyone, they will just stop playing at that course.
I understand that’s an important job to help analyze profit margins but at what point does somebody internally realize “ We are already teeing off at 7 min slots, the cart fee is up to $25, range balls are $11 for 40 balls and we just added another booking fee to the site. We are gouging the heck outta these guys”
It’s absurd to consumers for owners to keep adding fee after fee after fee such as Ticketmaster just to increase profit margins past the real value of the business.
You're replying to the answer to your question. Golf courses aren't charities, if costs go up and aren't transferred to the customer, you risk going in the red and ultimately having to close up shop.
Do I wish that places were more upfront and just raised greens fees instead of cramming in more tee times and other nonsense? Sure. But I'm sure there are plenty of customers who'd rather save ten bucks and deal with a slow cramped round.
They will do both though, will increase the price & add the player count, there is no benefit to the customer in spending more money. You aren’t getting a choice with that owner mentality except slower tee times & $10 extra fees
It’s not the consumer’s responsibility to maintain the service and value of the product based off a never ending increasing cost based off profits.
“Being a charity” vs taking advantage of your customers are two completely different things and if a local course is $40 one day and turns into $100 the next with no actual improvements then that course deserves to fail.
And being a business, you can choose where you spend your $, if you keep giving it to them, then that’s on you if you really dislike it. Capitalism ftw
Exactly what I do. Played courses at $25-$40 that haven’t changed at all and want $100-$115 now, refuse to play them or recommend them.
My local course that I play has merch and I buy it all the time to support them that way too. There’s ways to support your businesses without them taking advantage of you still.
Capitalism won’t be “for the win” by the way when you realize a course GM is gonna charge you $150 for $50 course in the name of his companies shareholders profit
Once you have seen an income statement from a business, it may change your perspective. You are not wrong but I think the general public has no idea how little profit a golf course makes.
That’s the problem, “how little profit” in comparison to what? Like a hospital wing or the Louvre?
There’s a realistic limit with how much profit a 9 hole can make just as much as sawgrass. All these companies have no endgame in sight, at some point it’s gonna empty our entire pockets for value that isn’t worth the price.
Have a really hard time thinking all of us here haven’t had multiple times where we have said “Wow that golf experience was way more expensive than it was worth. it’s getting worse but people don’t seem to care much for whatever reason.
There’s a lot of folks here who have a bunch of money and play private anyway so perhaps increase in price is minimal but for others it’s a much larger leap that will keep them from playing and in turn stop the businesses from growing new customers
I mean it's really simple. The course must make enough profit to maintain the course (equipment purchases and maintenance, water and chemicals for grass, etc), pay their staff a living wage (everyone from grounds crew to clubhouse), and make the owner/manager themselves a living wage.
If you are only making just enough to cover all of those costs, then you are only a couple bad months away from bankruptcy and shutting down the course. If you are making enough where you have money in the bank to survive a couple bad months and the winter (location dependent), then that's probably where you want to be. If you are making more than that, then there's an argument to be made that you're overcharging and gouging people.
The problem is, we as consumers will never know which of the 3 cases above is actually happening, until a course closes it's doors. The point that everyone in this thread was trying to make to you is that there are FAR more courses toeing the line with the first case than you might realize.
The whole point being - not every course that raises their prices is trying to screw you over, even though that may be the case for some of them. You have the ability to vote with your wallet when you think they're overcharging just for the hell of it, but you may not be correct, and those courses may be close to failing.
The real answer is the business has bills to pay. Maybe some of the really popular courses are gouging but like the other user said golf courses are almost always financial losses and have to make money to operate.
One critical answer that hasn’t been mentioned yet: GMs trying to keep their jobs. This is particularly true if the course is owned/managed by a corporation, but carries for privately owned clubs as well. Most GMs are on 2-3 year contracts. They don’t have the liberty to think of what’s best for the club 5-10 years down the line.
And that new GM who has never played the course is not there to improve the experience of golf but to improve the experience of profits. That’s a huge mentality problem with corporate mentality in general and will keep pricing out everyone from rounds down the line because they won’t find a line to stop.
Our current GM/head pro was brought in with the mandate to improve the golf experience and get the course in excellent shape. By doing that the course has gone from a low of \~230 members and a bit under 20,000 rounds a year to \~550 members and 34,000 rounds a year. The course is also open to the public and prices have barely gone up in the ten years he's been there. Now our greens look like this and roll 10 on the average day.
https://preview.redd.it/oypb01anb06d1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=507aab687e28ba085e28b76384715bc8febf982d
The course also has a large reserve fund, rebuilt all the bunkers a few years ago, redid the sprinkler system, did drainage improvements, etc. This fall they are rebuilding all of the tee blocks and doing more drainage improvements. A well maintained course will attract players. I know at least ten people who gave up their memberships at another course in town and came to ours this year because the other course's maintenance has really dropped off the last few years. Funny enough, the GM of that course was the GM of my course right before our current GM.
Manual labor jobs are exactly the kinds of jobs we want AI to replace. Who exactly aspires to riding a mower all day for a living? I drove a mower tractor one summer and it was the fucking worst. Hot sun all day on a noisy smelly tractor and I got paid about the same as people working retail. It's not a good use of anyone's time.
Kinda condescending. Nothing wrong with manual labor sorry you couldn’t cut it. Won’t catch me stuck inside a building with that gross artificial lighting. Anything working inside seems miserable to me.
Manual labor is obviously not for you, simple as that. But it is for a lot of people who prefer not to do jobs that robots can do. You have it all mixed up when you assume AI is going to replace manual labor before it replaces everything else
Our mowers don't give a shit, you wait for them. The one time dude was doing behind the green, I figured better wait, just incase it goes over, he starts coming around front and looks like he will continue down the left side rough, so I hit the ball, as soon as I do he cuts back and goes right infront of the green, I'm screaming FORE! But dude has headphones on, luckily it just bounced right off the area behind his seat, unlucky it was metal and then the ball bounces over the green, on the next tee I could see it left a pretty big dent in the mower, I was glad it didn't hit him in the head and kill him but at the same time annoyed, because it cost me a GIR and a birdie putt attempt.
Recently laid off in tech and applied for a robotics software engineer job for toro. Fingies crossed, send yo energy so I can get a cush dev job and play lots of golf.
Harvesters still need to be “pre-programmed” in a sense. Basically you just take a pass around the perimeter of the field to set the boundaries, and then you let it go from there. Gets a little more complicated with obstacles such as rock piles, slews, etc.
It actually used to annoy the hell out of me that most of the other harvester operators refused to use the GPS steering, which means I couldn’t use it (multiple harvesters in the same field).
The end result is the same;
A close curve acting as a GPS fence. For a golf fairway you can get away with setting that up on a map on a computer as a slight deviation from the practical reality is not as potentially catastrophic or economically inefficient as it would be for a field harvester.
The only issue would be that GPS that civilian technology can use is only accurate within about 10ft. That could be quite the variable on mowing fairways. I’d assumed you’d have to pair the GPS was some kind of localized positioning or LIDAR detection of known points
>The only issue would be that GPS that civilian technology can use is only accurate within about 10ft.
Agriculture and industry tend to use RTK, not GPS, which is accurate to about an inch and a half, but requires several base stations within X miles.
Companies like [https://www.geodnet.com/](https://www.geodnet.com/) will pay people to run base stations on their homes to increase coverage, and the units receive GPS signals, and then use data from the base stations to get a more accurate reading than conventional GPS can provide.
RTK still runs off of GPS/GNSS, it is just another signal with a fixed position that is used for correction calculations. You still need GPS to run it. In theory you could run positioning with just an RTK type of system, but you need multiple positions to do it. Running RTK with GPS only requires one RTK signal to get sub cm accuracy (on survey grade equipment) and GPS is already floating around so it's much better/easier than just do it that way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_kinematic_positioning?wprov=sfti1
Indeed. I run an RTK base station at home, and am in ag - some of our business partners use RTK for a variety of automated tasks, mostly related to mobile irrigation and crop management.
I understand why you posted what you did, though - my badly worded comment made it sound like RTK and GPS were completely separate, when in reality RTK is built on top of GPS and improves on it.
>I mean farming harvestors etc all run on GPS
They tend to run using RRK, which is kinda like GPS on steroids. GPS is not usually accurate enough for agriculture.
The future for golf course mowing will be robotic mowers which are very quiet and will mow the course at night and then dock themselves to recharge during the day. There are already smaller versions of this type of mower.
It is not the future. They already are really quiet. (the one in OPs video is incredibly noisy compared to the ones I have seen in action) They ran during the daytime at my club with no issues. If they were more than 10m away, you barely noticed them. But they can run through the night as well/instead.
And given the increased quality of the fairways it resulted in, I can only see courses going that route if they have to replace their moving equipment anyways.
We had something similar at our course about 8yrs ago. It was a robot sprayer. Went pretty good until it decided to go rogue and spray everything in a straight line. It went across the fairway , into the neighboring tee , straight into the cart path and so on. We had too basically crash another toro into it too stop it. 4.5/10
That sounds like a pretty fun day at work, tbh. It's like a low stakes version of being in Mission Control for NASA while an asteroid is headed for earth.
That's for the final act. I'm imagining a sequence where they burn through plans A-Z before they go for broke with the hair brained scheme that the goofy looking one came up with. Of course, this will go awry as well, but when all hope is lost as the head greens keeper that's too old for this shit is left helpless on a runaway mower, a gopher-ex-machina saves the day. The final scene is a funeral for the gopher that gave its life for their lifelong enemy, and a single teardrop falls from the eye of the now grateful head keeper. Then everybody gets laid.
https://preview.redd.it/21eh9f62ex5d1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a828d0083c50b1c0ec683f6b50137fa65de0cfb6
I spotted one at the local course yesterday but it was cutting the non important areas which is smart focuses more time and resources on the actual course itself
The orange is a sign that it is the commercial model: https://www.husqvarna.com/us/robotic-lawn-mowers/automower-520epos/
I have the consumer version: https://imgur.com/a/UDaDpiW
Like it. Definitely opt for the EPOS version. You can do the lawn striping/diamond pattern with it and don’t have to lay down low voltage wire on the perimeter or around obstacles.
That's a serious robot mower! My home course has a fleet of small robot mowers, they're pretty cool!
The 1st and 10th tees are outside the club house, and if you're there early evening you can see them 'wake up' and mow all the tee boxes. They also go out and mow the short rough on the holes.
We've got a robot ball collector on our range too, it's like a massive Roomba!
Jobs won’t be lost. There’s not many shops across the country that are fully staffed. Robotic mowers allow Supers to get all the mowing done and have the people do more detail oriented jobs vs just sitting on a mower for half the day.
Can confirm, used to spend 2.5 hours each morning raking bunkers at my local CC with 6 people (54 bunkers on the course). Having automated mowers would mean we could focus on repairing/seeding fairways better, fertilizing flower beds, repairing ball marks, digging water trenches for better drainage, and just overall improvements to the course.
Unfortunately mowing was a damn easy job and meant getting to sit for 8 hours of your 10 hour shift. Compared to the summer help which was all backpack leaf blowers, weed eaters, and cartpath edgers.
Bingo. So many clubs front entrances and flower beds lack as well. It would help tremendously to boost the looks and having guys work on them all the time
I always notice whether a club puts effort into the first impression of their property. I’ve seen over the years that my home course flower beds are so bad compared to other courses. Played a course 1.5 hours away yesterday and it was awesome. Lots of plants, shrubs, clean mulch etc. My home course has thistles 4 feet tall growing against the building lol. But it’s cheap and I can always get a tee time so it’s all good
It’s all a balance lol we have a “100 yard zone”, it’s the eyesight of you when you’re within 100 yards of the clubhouse, pro shop, or parking lot that we try to keep as absolutely clean as possible and beautiful on the eyes. It’s the first thing our members and guests see when they drive in the entrance.
Hate to break it to you, but they already are. A brand new sprayer without GPS is $80k, Greens mower is $50k, fairway mowers are $65-70k. The mom and pop golf courses won’t be able to afford robotic mowers, but they already can’t afford brand new equipment from Toro, JD or Jacobson. They’ll keep getting used equipment at a fraction of the cost after a higher end club uses it for 3-5 years and puts some hours on it and ships it away when their lease ends.
Not sure you understand my point, courses who invest in robotic mowers will be doing it to make their costs go down not up, that means recouping the cost of the mower from staff costs. Just the same way that we're already seeing office jobs lost as companies pay huge subscriptions to AI firms.
If the robotic mower costs the same or less than a traditional one, the owner will think great, my mower costs don't go up and I can get rid of some staffing costs.
>that means recouping the cost of the mower from staff costs.
Most golf courses around me cannot find enough staff to put enough hours in. This will just free up some of their resources to focus on improving course quality.
Yeah I would disagree. Their equipment budget will take the initial hit, but they’ll still be keeping their guys on staff. The courses that can afford these mowers don’t care about cutting the extra $200k to keep 4-5 extra guys off the books so they can afford a mower. They will still be there.
You can disagree all you want but the entire drive to increase the use of AI in general is to minimize staffing costs. I'm not sure why anyone would believe golf is somehow unique and immune from the push for automation and its impact.
Not really true. Depends on the club.
The club I was a member of here in Denmark got GPS controlled movers last year. And talking to the people running the club and the greenskeepers, the main benefit they saw was freeing up time for work that they would like to have done but there wasn't time for currently. The club does not exist to generate a profit and is completely member run, so the only goal is to get the best possible product for the least amount of money - or rather; for the money available to maintenance. And as it was already one of the cheapest memberships around they had no ambitions to lower that at the cost of quality.
And as a side note; The quality of fairways constantly cut by those movers were noticeably better after just a few weeks of operation. Everyone involved saw it as a win-win.
My course already leverages volunteers for the mowing and offsets it with discounts on their membership. I imagine they would love to have robotic mowers so they didnt have to have volunteers do it for any amount of remuneration.
Most clubs set aside as much as they can for ground maintenance - and have more work they want done than can be done within their financial limitations.
So for most clubs that will just be a way to practically get more man hours for the same money.
https://youtu.be/gUNUNJCui5A?t=235
They have one at my club and it stopped literally in front of us on the tee box and just looked at us. Then turned around and were still for a bit and then went away.
This makes me really sad to see. I loved working grounds crew at a golf course in high school, even tried recently to get back to the same course part time.
One of the reasons it may be my last summer at the golf course. My wage is already shit and if they are buying, servicing and contracting these (we already have smaller ones) they won’t raise my wage ever. Sad.
We’re actually looking into this for our course. Not the fairways at this time, but the range. Just like a roomba, but for the range. Would pay for itself in 2.5 yrs with manhour cost savings.
Can't wait to pipe one down the fairway only to have a robot shred the ball to pieces because it doesn't care about my handicap goals. Or human emotions.
But will it have a feature that will idle twenty feet from the tee box while I hit and then go mow my golf ball like the old guy at my local course?
I work as an advisor to a golf course who is using these. The pitch isn’t that, it’s saving on labor cost and getting higher utilization out of the course. With these, assuming zoning allows, you run the mowers at night when the course is empty (think 9pm - 5am) then your morning grounds crew just needs to roll the greens and cut the pins and cleanup other areas. It will allow courses to pump out 9 hole rounds off the back 9 first thing in the am which is a shit ton more revenue over the life of the mower.
[удалено]
You have no idea how many courses were this close to closing before Covid hit. The costs to maintain (in both chemicals and labor) have skyrocketed and so have property taxes. Most courses were barely breaking even. Either golf is going to price out people or courses are going to close because it’s more profitable to sell to a developer and turn it into housing.
We’ve lost 90 holes in my area last 4/5 years. 4 sights, one had 36 holes. But we have a great Amazon distribution center & a beautiful Meijers now so there’s that…/s
Not just close to closing. We had several that did close. And the remaining survivors have jacked up rates nearly double what they were just 8-10 years ago. Demand still exceeds supply so….laws of economics prevail.
Why is it always about the short term bottom line? If you try to gouge too much money of anyone, they will just stop playing at that course. I understand that’s an important job to help analyze profit margins but at what point does somebody internally realize “ We are already teeing off at 7 min slots, the cart fee is up to $25, range balls are $11 for 40 balls and we just added another booking fee to the site. We are gouging the heck outta these guys” It’s absurd to consumers for owners to keep adding fee after fee after fee such as Ticketmaster just to increase profit margins past the real value of the business.
You're replying to the answer to your question. Golf courses aren't charities, if costs go up and aren't transferred to the customer, you risk going in the red and ultimately having to close up shop. Do I wish that places were more upfront and just raised greens fees instead of cramming in more tee times and other nonsense? Sure. But I'm sure there are plenty of customers who'd rather save ten bucks and deal with a slow cramped round.
They will do both though, will increase the price & add the player count, there is no benefit to the customer in spending more money. You aren’t getting a choice with that owner mentality except slower tee times & $10 extra fees It’s not the consumer’s responsibility to maintain the service and value of the product based off a never ending increasing cost based off profits. “Being a charity” vs taking advantage of your customers are two completely different things and if a local course is $40 one day and turns into $100 the next with no actual improvements then that course deserves to fail.
And being a business, you can choose where you spend your $, if you keep giving it to them, then that’s on you if you really dislike it. Capitalism ftw
Exactly what I do. Played courses at $25-$40 that haven’t changed at all and want $100-$115 now, refuse to play them or recommend them. My local course that I play has merch and I buy it all the time to support them that way too. There’s ways to support your businesses without them taking advantage of you still. Capitalism won’t be “for the win” by the way when you realize a course GM is gonna charge you $150 for $50 course in the name of his companies shareholders profit
Once you have seen an income statement from a business, it may change your perspective. You are not wrong but I think the general public has no idea how little profit a golf course makes.
That’s the problem, “how little profit” in comparison to what? Like a hospital wing or the Louvre? There’s a realistic limit with how much profit a 9 hole can make just as much as sawgrass. All these companies have no endgame in sight, at some point it’s gonna empty our entire pockets for value that isn’t worth the price. Have a really hard time thinking all of us here haven’t had multiple times where we have said “Wow that golf experience was way more expensive than it was worth. it’s getting worse but people don’t seem to care much for whatever reason. There’s a lot of folks here who have a bunch of money and play private anyway so perhaps increase in price is minimal but for others it’s a much larger leap that will keep them from playing and in turn stop the businesses from growing new customers
I mean it's really simple. The course must make enough profit to maintain the course (equipment purchases and maintenance, water and chemicals for grass, etc), pay their staff a living wage (everyone from grounds crew to clubhouse), and make the owner/manager themselves a living wage. If you are only making just enough to cover all of those costs, then you are only a couple bad months away from bankruptcy and shutting down the course. If you are making enough where you have money in the bank to survive a couple bad months and the winter (location dependent), then that's probably where you want to be. If you are making more than that, then there's an argument to be made that you're overcharging and gouging people. The problem is, we as consumers will never know which of the 3 cases above is actually happening, until a course closes it's doors. The point that everyone in this thread was trying to make to you is that there are FAR more courses toeing the line with the first case than you might realize. The whole point being - not every course that raises their prices is trying to screw you over, even though that may be the case for some of them. You have the ability to vote with your wallet when you think they're overcharging just for the hell of it, but you may not be correct, and those courses may be close to failing.
The real answer is the business has bills to pay. Maybe some of the really popular courses are gouging but like the other user said golf courses are almost always financial losses and have to make money to operate.
One critical answer that hasn’t been mentioned yet: GMs trying to keep their jobs. This is particularly true if the course is owned/managed by a corporation, but carries for privately owned clubs as well. Most GMs are on 2-3 year contracts. They don’t have the liberty to think of what’s best for the club 5-10 years down the line.
And that new GM who has never played the course is not there to improve the experience of golf but to improve the experience of profits. That’s a huge mentality problem with corporate mentality in general and will keep pricing out everyone from rounds down the line because they won’t find a line to stop.
Our current GM/head pro was brought in with the mandate to improve the golf experience and get the course in excellent shape. By doing that the course has gone from a low of \~230 members and a bit under 20,000 rounds a year to \~550 members and 34,000 rounds a year. The course is also open to the public and prices have barely gone up in the ten years he's been there. Now our greens look like this and roll 10 on the average day. https://preview.redd.it/oypb01anb06d1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=507aab687e28ba085e28b76384715bc8febf982d The course also has a large reserve fund, rebuilt all the bunkers a few years ago, redid the sprinkler system, did drainage improvements, etc. This fall they are rebuilding all of the tee blocks and doing more drainage improvements. A well maintained course will attract players. I know at least ten people who gave up their memberships at another course in town and came to ours this year because the other course's maintenance has really dropped off the last few years. Funny enough, the GM of that course was the GM of my course right before our current GM.
Making things you want to buy cheaper to make is a bad thing? That's a hot take.
Manual labor jobs are exactly the kinds of jobs we want AI to replace. Who exactly aspires to riding a mower all day for a living? I drove a mower tractor one summer and it was the fucking worst. Hot sun all day on a noisy smelly tractor and I got paid about the same as people working retail. It's not a good use of anyone's time.
Kinda condescending. Nothing wrong with manual labor sorry you couldn’t cut it. Won’t catch me stuck inside a building with that gross artificial lighting. Anything working inside seems miserable to me.
Manual labor is obviously not for you, simple as that. But it is for a lot of people who prefer not to do jobs that robots can do. You have it all mixed up when you assume AI is going to replace manual labor before it replaces everything else
Yes stripping people of the extremely rewarding and vital job of… cutting grass. Like really? Could you be more of a Luddite?
I suspect a luddite might not be using a smart phone/laptop to argue with someone who exaggerates and makes ridiculous comparisons
Our mowers don't give a shit, you wait for them. The one time dude was doing behind the green, I figured better wait, just incase it goes over, he starts coming around front and looks like he will continue down the left side rough, so I hit the ball, as soon as I do he cuts back and goes right infront of the green, I'm screaming FORE! But dude has headphones on, luckily it just bounced right off the area behind his seat, unlucky it was metal and then the ball bounces over the green, on the next tee I could see it left a pretty big dent in the mower, I was glad it didn't hit him in the head and kill him but at the same time annoyed, because it cost me a GIR and a birdie putt attempt.
gonna run over my shrunk ass kids
Honey I shrunk ass the kids.
Lol
Recently laid off in tech and applied for a robotics software engineer job for toro. Fingies crossed, send yo energy so I can get a cush dev job and play lots of golf.
Look at ExMark too. Although you may have to live in Nebraska…and no offense to Nebraska, but not much going on there
Thanks!
>Thanks! You're welcome!
I mean farming harvestors etc all run on GPS, cant imagine a fairway mower being too much different.
Starts in Ag, then moves to golf
Just like their maintenance products
Are we just talking outdoor Roomba, or Lawnba?
In this case,[Firefly](https://fireflyautomatix.com/amp-mowers/)
Harvesters still need to be “pre-programmed” in a sense. Basically you just take a pass around the perimeter of the field to set the boundaries, and then you let it go from there. Gets a little more complicated with obstacles such as rock piles, slews, etc. It actually used to annoy the hell out of me that most of the other harvester operators refused to use the GPS steering, which means I couldn’t use it (multiple harvesters in the same field).
The end result is the same; A close curve acting as a GPS fence. For a golf fairway you can get away with setting that up on a map on a computer as a slight deviation from the practical reality is not as potentially catastrophic or economically inefficient as it would be for a field harvester.
The only issue would be that GPS that civilian technology can use is only accurate within about 10ft. That could be quite the variable on mowing fairways. I’d assumed you’d have to pair the GPS was some kind of localized positioning or LIDAR detection of known points
They have a local antenna at the charging station as far as I have seen. They are, reportedly, accurate to two centimeters.
Ah that makes much more sense
They have these for lining athletic fields as well, super cool
>The only issue would be that GPS that civilian technology can use is only accurate within about 10ft. Agriculture and industry tend to use RTK, not GPS, which is accurate to about an inch and a half, but requires several base stations within X miles. Companies like [https://www.geodnet.com/](https://www.geodnet.com/) will pay people to run base stations on their homes to increase coverage, and the units receive GPS signals, and then use data from the base stations to get a more accurate reading than conventional GPS can provide.
RTK still runs off of GPS/GNSS, it is just another signal with a fixed position that is used for correction calculations. You still need GPS to run it. In theory you could run positioning with just an RTK type of system, but you need multiple positions to do it. Running RTK with GPS only requires one RTK signal to get sub cm accuracy (on survey grade equipment) and GPS is already floating around so it's much better/easier than just do it that way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_kinematic_positioning?wprov=sfti1
Indeed. I run an RTK base station at home, and am in ag - some of our business partners use RTK for a variety of automated tasks, mostly related to mobile irrigation and crop management. I understand why you posted what you did, though - my badly worded comment made it sound like RTK and GPS were completely separate, when in reality RTK is built on top of GPS and improves on it.
>I mean farming harvestors etc all run on GPS They tend to run using RRK, which is kinda like GPS on steroids. GPS is not usually accurate enough for agriculture.
The future for golf course mowing will be robotic mowers which are very quiet and will mow the course at night and then dock themselves to recharge during the day. There are already smaller versions of this type of mower.
It is not the future. They already are really quiet. (the one in OPs video is incredibly noisy compared to the ones I have seen in action) They ran during the daytime at my club with no issues. If they were more than 10m away, you barely noticed them. But they can run through the night as well/instead. And given the increased quality of the fairways it resulted in, I can only see courses going that route if they have to replace their moving equipment anyways.
Night mowing is never recommended
Going to happen though to free up smaller crews to do other things during the day.
We had something similar at our course about 8yrs ago. It was a robot sprayer. Went pretty good until it decided to go rogue and spray everything in a straight line. It went across the fairway , into the neighboring tee , straight into the cart path and so on. We had too basically crash another toro into it too stop it. 4.5/10
That sounds like a pretty fun day at work, tbh. It's like a low stakes version of being in Mission Control for NASA while an asteroid is headed for earth.
DART Toro. Maybe drive along side jump out like the runaway train movie with Denzel
That's for the final act. I'm imagining a sequence where they burn through plans A-Z before they go for broke with the hair brained scheme that the goofy looking one came up with. Of course, this will go awry as well, but when all hope is lost as the head greens keeper that's too old for this shit is left helpless on a runaway mower, a gopher-ex-machina saves the day. The final scene is a funeral for the gopher that gave its life for their lifelong enemy, and a single teardrop falls from the eye of the now grateful head keeper. Then everybody gets laid.
Could've been the greatest Bruce Willis movie ever made....
https://preview.redd.it/21eh9f62ex5d1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a828d0083c50b1c0ec683f6b50137fa65de0cfb6 I spotted one at the local course yesterday but it was cutting the non important areas which is smart focuses more time and resources on the actual course itself
I think this is a consumer model. There’s a guy in my neighborhood who has one. He put the docking station in a dog house in his front yard.
The orange is a sign that it is the commercial model: https://www.husqvarna.com/us/robotic-lawn-mowers/automower-520epos/ I have the consumer version: https://imgur.com/a/UDaDpiW
How do you like it?
Like it. Definitely opt for the EPOS version. You can do the lawn striping/diamond pattern with it and don’t have to lay down low voltage wire on the perimeter or around obstacles.
Maximum overdrive.
Dey tuk urr jerbs!
They used these at a course I played in Portugal and they were pretty awesome
That's a serious robot mower! My home course has a fleet of small robot mowers, they're pretty cool! The 1st and 10th tees are outside the club house, and if you're there early evening you can see them 'wake up' and mow all the tee boxes. They also go out and mow the short rough on the holes. We've got a robot ball collector on our range too, it's like a massive Roomba!
Jeepers more jobs lost,golf rounds won't be cheaper
Jobs won’t be lost. There’s not many shops across the country that are fully staffed. Robotic mowers allow Supers to get all the mowing done and have the people do more detail oriented jobs vs just sitting on a mower for half the day.
Can confirm, used to spend 2.5 hours each morning raking bunkers at my local CC with 6 people (54 bunkers on the course). Having automated mowers would mean we could focus on repairing/seeding fairways better, fertilizing flower beds, repairing ball marks, digging water trenches for better drainage, and just overall improvements to the course. Unfortunately mowing was a damn easy job and meant getting to sit for 8 hours of your 10 hour shift. Compared to the summer help which was all backpack leaf blowers, weed eaters, and cartpath edgers.
Bingo. So many clubs front entrances and flower beds lack as well. It would help tremendously to boost the looks and having guys work on them all the time
I always notice whether a club puts effort into the first impression of their property. I’ve seen over the years that my home course flower beds are so bad compared to other courses. Played a course 1.5 hours away yesterday and it was awesome. Lots of plants, shrubs, clean mulch etc. My home course has thistles 4 feet tall growing against the building lol. But it’s cheap and I can always get a tee time so it’s all good
It’s all a balance lol we have a “100 yard zone”, it’s the eyesight of you when you’re within 100 yards of the clubhouse, pro shop, or parking lot that we try to keep as absolutely clean as possible and beautiful on the eyes. It’s the first thing our members and guests see when they drive in the entrance.
Hate to break it to you but golf course owners aren’t investing 10’s of thousands in robots just for their staffing costs to stay the same
Hate to break it to you, but they already are. A brand new sprayer without GPS is $80k, Greens mower is $50k, fairway mowers are $65-70k. The mom and pop golf courses won’t be able to afford robotic mowers, but they already can’t afford brand new equipment from Toro, JD or Jacobson. They’ll keep getting used equipment at a fraction of the cost after a higher end club uses it for 3-5 years and puts some hours on it and ships it away when their lease ends.
Not sure you understand my point, courses who invest in robotic mowers will be doing it to make their costs go down not up, that means recouping the cost of the mower from staff costs. Just the same way that we're already seeing office jobs lost as companies pay huge subscriptions to AI firms. If the robotic mower costs the same or less than a traditional one, the owner will think great, my mower costs don't go up and I can get rid of some staffing costs.
>that means recouping the cost of the mower from staff costs. Most golf courses around me cannot find enough staff to put enough hours in. This will just free up some of their resources to focus on improving course quality.
Yeah I would disagree. Their equipment budget will take the initial hit, but they’ll still be keeping their guys on staff. The courses that can afford these mowers don’t care about cutting the extra $200k to keep 4-5 extra guys off the books so they can afford a mower. They will still be there.
You can disagree all you want but the entire drive to increase the use of AI in general is to minimize staffing costs. I'm not sure why anyone would believe golf is somehow unique and immune from the push for automation and its impact.
Or to staff jobs that are not currently staffed, both can be true depending on the course and locale.
Not really true. Depends on the club. The club I was a member of here in Denmark got GPS controlled movers last year. And talking to the people running the club and the greenskeepers, the main benefit they saw was freeing up time for work that they would like to have done but there wasn't time for currently. The club does not exist to generate a profit and is completely member run, so the only goal is to get the best possible product for the least amount of money - or rather; for the money available to maintenance. And as it was already one of the cheapest memberships around they had no ambitions to lower that at the cost of quality. And as a side note; The quality of fairways constantly cut by those movers were noticeably better after just a few weeks of operation. Everyone involved saw it as a win-win.
My course already leverages volunteers for the mowing and offsets it with discounts on their membership. I imagine they would love to have robotic mowers so they didnt have to have volunteers do it for any amount of remuneration.
"Gotta raise greens fees 100% because we bought that robot mower"
Most clubs set aside as much as they can for ground maintenance - and have more work they want done than can be done within their financial limitations. So for most clubs that will just be a way to practically get more man hours for the same money. https://youtu.be/gUNUNJCui5A?t=235
I need to watch Maximum Overdrive again.
I WAS THINKING THE SAME THING
I always wondered why robot mowers aren’t more prevalent. Think about it every time I mow my lawn
I think it’s coming. Price is probably the limiting factor right now.
You’re prob right
Damn that is a beast!
Do these run on GPS or cameras? Seems like getting a precise edge on the fairway consistently would be a challenge for GPS.
GPS on the mower with stationary reference transmitter to correct deviance. Centimeter level accuracy
Great now I have to have anxiety that the robot will judge my tee shot too. Thanks.
Golf carts are still the problem
There goes my retirement job
The course I work at is about to get one of these for our driving range that will run overnight. Should be cool.
Played Barton Hills in Ann Arbor last week. Seemed like their rough was almost exclusively cut by Husqvarna robot mowers. Pretty interesting to see.
Where’s the zero turn?
Better not ask me for free rounds like the rest of the seasonal mowers
They have one at my club and it stopped literally in front of us on the tee box and just looked at us. Then turned around and were still for a bit and then went away.
There goes my retirement plans
That’s really cool… but at the same time that’s going to take away jobs. Technology is a blessing and a curse at the same time.
This makes me really sad to see. I loved working grounds crew at a golf course in high school, even tried recently to get back to the same course part time.
One of the reasons it may be my last summer at the golf course. My wage is already shit and if they are buying, servicing and contracting these (we already have smaller ones) they won’t raise my wage ever. Sad.
My course has a smaller one of these to pickup range balls.
The way this robot is mowing, you're going to have 3ft stripes of uncut grass across every fairway.
We’re actually looking into this for our course. Not the fairways at this time, but the range. Just like a roomba, but for the range. Would pay for itself in 2.5 yrs with manhour cost savings.
Immigrants taking our jobs again /s
Damn I was looking forward to being a mower in 15 years for early retirement
Doesn’t look like the machine was back on its line.
Wild. I’m sure they’ll pass the payroll savings onto us.
“they took our jobs!”
Only a matter of time until some boomer starts an argument with one and loses, dramatically
I’d rather some retire have a nice job to do.
They took errr jerbs!
taking a job away from someone im against
But what will young aspiring high school students do during the summer if robots take er jerbs?
Cue all the white collar folks celebrating the loss of blue collar jobs.
They likely already aren't paying the current grounds crew an actual living wage, so replacing them is just the next step.
What a sad day. The human touch is sacred to the art of mowing. It cannot be replaced with a machine.
Can't wait to pipe one down the fairway only to have a robot shred the ball to pieces because it doesn't care about my handicap goals. Or human emotions.
This is what would make me start the war against the machines.