From mowers to line painters, robotic technology goes to work in city parks

It used to take a team of five people multiple days to determine how to line athletic fields in city parks.

They would stake out where a line would be, run string across, draw the length and width and midline, and then draw a circle with a stake in the middle holding out a string to get the perfect circumference.

But that’s so 2022.

For the past two seasons, the Sioux Falls Parks & Recreation team has been using a robotic field painter called Turf Tank.

“What used to take days now takes hours,” said Brett Kollars, assistant director, who credits the department’s caretaker at Yankton Trail Park for discovering the product.

“It quickly proved it worked. We started on soccer fields at Yankton, and we’ve expanded to Tomar Park and the Sanford Sports Complex for football fields.”

The city now owns two of the robotic painters. Conservatively, Kollars estimates that they paid for themselves in one season.

“Our (parks) system has been expanding, so the answer is not simply throwing more people at it,” he said. “We’ve been able to maintain with the amount of labor we had. We didn’t have layoffs as we adopted this innovation, but it allowed staff to focus elsewhere.”

Not to mention, the quality of the lines painted is superior, and the system can be adjusted easily for field size and configuration, he said.

“It was like rocket science, and now it’s the drag of a thumb on an iPad,” he said. “We know the answer is not simply adding more people. We need to find ways to work smarter, not harder.”

This season brought another such innovation: four robotic mowers that have been deployed at Jacobson Plaza in downtown Sioux Falls, Tuthill Park gardens, the Westside Recreation Center and the park maintenance headquarters at 49th Street and Oxbow Avenue.

“You program a space, describe ‘no mow’ spaces for it if we don’t want it traversing a certain area,” Kollars said. “It has obstacle recognition, and that has proven beneficial because we are working in public spaces.”

All four spaces used to be maintained with push mowers.

At Jacobson Plaza, it’s especially valuable given the intricate spaces and heavy usage.

“Our staff is able to pay attention to other details — keep up with the garbage generation that occurs there, power wash the splash pad, all things we can lend a hand toward because we don’t have to sweat the mowing,” Kollars said.

The mowers also can work at night, potentially eliminating disturbances to people using the parks during the day.

If someone were to try and steal the mower, it immediately stops functioning and notifies a local caretaker. Plus, because they’re all equipped with 4G, “we know exactly where it goes if it’s taken away,” Kollars said.

He estimates that the return on investment for the mowers will happen in one to two seasons. And again, the quality is there.

“It’s very intuitive, and (the team) is shocked by the quality of the cut,” Kollars said. “Our guys love turf, and they were worried about quality moving to robots, but they’ve been pleasantly surprised.”

The technology has the opportunity “to really revolutionize how we approach our work,” he added.

There also are new tech-enhanced products to consider, Kollars said.

“Spraying, fertilizing, aerating. We have our eye toward additional innovation to continue to find ways to work smart.”