Five Robotic Greens Mowers Take Over Daily Setup at a San Diego Area Golf Club

Greens and bunkers absorb the labor

Much of a golf course's labor sits on its greens and bunkers. Putting greens are mowed through the whole year, a schedule that leaves little slack for a crew that also has to get the course ready for play each morning.

Steep bunker slopes add their own burden, since they call for frequent hand raking. For a San Diego-area golf club, every morning began with a setup window that had to close before play, and every hour spent on repetitive mowing was an hour not available for other work.

• Putting greens mowed on a schedule that runs all year
• Steep bunker slopes that need frequent hand raking
• A daily setup window that must close before play begins

Five mowers aimed squarely at setup

The club put five robotic greens mowers into its daily setup work. The purpose was plain: cut the time and labor that setup demanded.

Consistency on each green was a practical concern from the start. The mowers hold a consistent perimeter on each green, something that is hard to achieve without GPS based positioning and a wire sensor set into the ground. Those two elements are what make a repeatable edge possible.

• Five robotic greens mowers assigned to daily course setup
• GPS based positioning to guide each unit across the green
• A wire sensor set into the ground to hold the perimeter
• Putting greens kept on a mowing schedule that runs all year

Productivity rises and green labor falls

The mowers increased productivity and reduced the labor needed to maintain the putting greens. For a superintendent deciding where a crew's hours belong, those two outcomes sit at the heart of the decision.

A consistent perimeter on every green gives the crew a steadier surface to work with each day, and that steadiness carries through the rest of the routine.

The practical gain is capacity. The same crew is freed from some of the repetitive mowing that once filled its early hours, and that time can go toward work that still needs people.

What a fleet decision asks of a course

A mower is only one part of a working fleet. Layout, boundary setup, charging, staff training and the service behind each unit all decide whether the gains hold. Service Robot Co. treats that full lifecycle as a single job. We select the right robots across manufacturers, then arrange a robot lease, deploy, integrate, train and service every unit through our nationwide US engineer network. As a vendor neutral robot integrator, we aim for the mower that fits the site, not the one a single catalog happens to offer.

Our offer is a three year lease on the robots, through financing, with one fixed lease payment quoted after a site assessment. A business can begin with one leased unit to see how it performs on its own grounds, then widen the fleet if the results justify it.

A course weighing a fleet of its own will ask much the same questions this club faced: where the robots fit, how they are positioned, who services them and what the lease payment covers. Those are the questions worth answering first.