TECHNICAL
”
I think using it was quite daunting to start with because there’s a lot of options in there of things you can edit, but when you get your head around it, it’s quite self-explanatory and straightforward
The Turf Tank is capable of creating club logos
But, away from the pristine carpets of Championship football, contractors such as Premier Pitches and Countrywide Grounds Maintenance are using their own robots with the more traditional challenges of uneven surfaces and moving from site to site each day. As a Sports Turf Contractor at Premier Pitches, Liam Reynolds has been hands-on with the robot since April 2021 and, in that time, has trained staff from their early twenties to mid-fifties on the new technology. “The central core of the business is sports turf renovations, but then we have a lot of ground maintenance contracts between August and April,” Liam explains. “So that is looking after anything from grassroots football and rugby up to semi-professional football. It’s grass cutting, linemarking, spraying selective herbicides - low level general grounds maintenance but providing them with a high standard of service.” “We are currently contracted to maintain twenty pitches, two rugby pitches and eighteen football pitches. So, to do the initial marking, we’d need anything between three and five people going out and marking from scratch and, after that, it’s at least two people once a week going around the twenty pitches overmarking them.” “We’d looked at the Turf Tank a couple of years ago, and then our attention got diverted onto other parts of the business, and we went away from the idea. But, with furlough and Covid hitting last year, I and one of the directors, John Woolfall, looked at in a bit more depth to ease the workload on staff.” “We got in touch with Matt at Turf Tank, and he came out and did a demonstration for us, and for how quickly he went to one of the pitches, found the sockets, put in the dimensions and then marked it out almost from scratch - that sold it in itself to us. We’d be using three people for three or four hours to mark it out from scratch, but he had it done in three-quarters of an hour and then, when you times that by twenty - especially for the initial marks - it is a significant saving.” 124
PC August/September 2021
“During furlough, we had one member of staff marking, and it took him all day to mark one pitch out on his own from scratch because he was up and down with his tape measure and stringing lines but, with the Turf Tank, it takes twenty-five minutes to mark a pitch and you can repeat as often as you want. You put the GPS where it needs to be, and the robot knows where the pitches are, and it’s a 25-minute job in the future.” “It’s been very accurate for what we want to do. Week on week, you put the base station in the exact same place, and you can see to almost a millimetre that the robot is following the same line as what it put down last week.” “I think using it was quite daunting to start with because there’s a lot of options in there of things you can edit, but when you get your head around it, it’s quite self-explanatory and straightforward. There’s plenty of options in there that you can edit any part of a template that you like and add segments in or take bits out.” “We’ve got people that work from their early twenties up to their mid-fifties, and they all seem to have grasped it on the first attempt. I think the younger ones grasp the technology quicker. If we had to use it to mark something we hadn’t before, like an athletics track, I think the younger ones would be more likely to explore the software. Still, it is simple enough that anybody in the company now is capable and confident of picking up the tablet and going out.” “By the time they have set out four or five pitches, it’s then just a routine, and they know what they are doing, and it is just a routine and a process. So, as complicated as it looks, it is so self-explanatory in the same way, and I think for people in their fifties to pick the tablet up and, after a day of tuition, go out and use it without any problems says itself how simple it can be.” “What we are now looking at from a contracting side is offering an initial marking service. So, if we went to a football club, let’s say to someone’s training ground, the first year we went there, we’d put all the pitches
