Are autonomous mowers the solution to the labor crisis?

Autonomous mowers will provide the golf maintenance industry relief from its labor crisis. The question is when.

It isn’t just that good help is hard to find these days. It’s also hard to afford.

Case in point, Jeff Miller, superintendent at The Santaluz Club in San Diego, who was faced with a labor shortage. So he decided to hire a robot.

Last year, Cub Cadet released the RG3 robotic putting green mower after its January 2015 acquisition of Precise Path Robotics. Miller was sold on it as soon as he saw it demonstrated. He started with one unit to test its efficiency. He’s already bought three more, which he says will save him an estimated $86,000 to $113,000 per year.

He operates each mower on five greens, the maximum capacity for one machine. Each morning before golfers get on the course, a crew member — the RG3’s wingman — hauls one to a hole and leaves it on the edge of the green. He situates four beacons around the outside of the green in a pattern specific to that hole. The beacons and the mower exchange sound waves, which tell the mower what green it’s on and that green’s cut specifications. Once the beacons are set, the wingman activates the mower, and the robot cuts the green on its own.

Miller reports that his operation runs more efficiently than ever and the robots haven’t erased his human workers. In fact, he hasn’t let anybody go and doesn’t plan to. Instead, he reallocates the labor to other tasks. Where he used to send a three-man crew, he now sends one crewmember and the robot. While the mower cuts, the wingman performs other tasks on the green. The RG3 cuts an average green of 5,000 square feet in about 50 minutes, giving the wingman a specific time frame for completing his end of the work.

“We do so much work by hand, like raking and rolling, that it just fit our operation perfectly,” Miller says. “When I put the robot out there, I free up three guys in the morning.”

Dabbling with technology

Robots are big business these days. From idea to implementation of any robotic technology takes years of work and millions in investment to come to fruition.

The National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) is a developmental wing of the renowned Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science in Pittsburgh. The 1,000-person Robotics Institute is one of the largest bodies of researchers studying the technology in the world. These minds are so coveted that Uber poached 40 of its faculty to work on an autonomous cab, leaving the company with a $5.5 million donation as reparation.

About 50 percent of NREC’s budget comes from partnerships with the U.S. government. The largest part of that fraction comes from the U.S. Department of Defense, for which NREC builds autonomous battle vehicles. NREC also has public sector partners, like John Deere. Its agriculture division isn’t selling driverless equipment yet, but products like the AutoTrac and the Auto Steer systems guide tractors to harvest crops, lay seed and perform general tasks at an efficiency rate unmatched by human control. All the while, the operator, or supervisor, sits back and monitors data on a video screen. The Washington Post even called Deere more progressive on autonomous technology than Google.

Jeff Legault, NREC’s director of strategic business development, says its purpose is to turn the Robotics Institute’s research into something tangible that its partners can bring to market.

“We’re trying to solve problems for clients instead of doing research of our own,” he says. “The problem is solved when we find the lowest cost solution.”

Currently, John Deere’s only foray into the robotic mower market is its Tango, a Roomba-vacuum-style mower for consumers that sells in England. Other mower manufacturers have gone down this road, too.

Cub Cadet’s robotic mower exchanges sound waves with beacons around a green that tell the unit what green it’s on.

Toro experimented with the idea of an autonomous mower more than a decade ago. In 2002, the company partnered with NREC to build an autonomous mower for the golf market. Toro gave NREC two mowers for the prototypes: a Greensmaster 3100 for mowing putting greens and a Groundmaster 3500 to mow sports fields.

“The hypothesis is if you can make a two-man crew into a one-man crew or a three-man crew into a two, it reduces the cost of labor,” says Dana Lonn, managing director of The Toro Co.’s Center for Advanced Turf Technology.

NREC and Toro were successful in building an autonomous mower prototype. Unlike a Roomba-style robotic mower, the autonomous mower did not need beacons or guide wires to operate. Instead, it used technology like Lidars, Pose Estimate and GPS to learn its position, surroundings and terrain and react to them. It gave the mower pinpoint accuracy and the ability to stop if a human or object got too close.

Though it worked, NREC and Toro were unable to produce the equipment at a realistic price, which the company saw as about double the market price for a commercial mower. At the time, this advanced technology wasn’t cheap enough. So Toro abandoned the project, and though the two organizations keep in touch, they haven’t actively worked together since 2013.

Leap forward

Rick Cuddihe is president of Rick Cuddihe & Associates, which operates Lafayette Consulting Co. While on assignment for a client of his consulting firm in 2009, Cuddihe was researching the commercial mower market and mostly found what he calls, “varying degrees of good.”

Upon further research, Cuddihe stumbled upon NREC’s website detailing the project with Toro. He was enamored by the idea. He did more research and realized it could be done, and it could be done affordably. In his opinion, the robotics mower market is on the verge of a great leap forward, and he hopes to be a part of it.

“It’s my opinion that there’s going to be robotic golf equipment, and the big driver is the saving of labor,” says Cuddihe. “I’ve surveyed golf course owners all over the country and it has showed me that the average salary for an operator is $26,000.”

That’s about the same price that Cuddihe wants his autonomous mowing attachment — yes, an attachment — to cost. A golf course with three operators can go down to one operator who transports the mower from hole to hole and then cuts the greens and fringe while the robot knocks out the fairway and rough.

Sorry, no help with the fringe or around bunkers. Cuddihe says no one would make the investment in the necessary technology. What it would be capable of is exiting a fairway or rough as soon as a golfer sets foot on the tee.

On each tee box, a small electronic touch pad would allow golfers to control a mower in the fairway or rough. When golfers tap the pad, the mower would immediately exit 60 yards off to the side and sit there for 11 minutes to give the golfers a chance to finish the hole.

If the golfers don’t see the mower and hit a ball in its path, sensors on the unit would lift the reel 4 inches before the ball and 3 inches after.

“If this thing works the way we plan for it to work, somebody is going to like it,” says Cuddihe.

Technological advancements

Cuddihe, 67, knows the mower market. He’s been all over the industry, and fondly recalls the first days of zero-turn mowers. He’s now formed a partnership with the NREC, started Robotic Turf Equipment,and is embarking on a quest to bring an autonomous mower to market.

“It doesn’t interest me to do the same thing everyone else is doing,” Cuddihe says. “What excites me is bringing something new and different to the market.”

“There’s going to be robotic golf equipment, and the big driver is the saving of labor,” says Cuddihe.

Since the Toro project faltered the technology became cheaper and more accurate, Cuddihe says. In the first run, GPS technology was too weak. RTK base stations, which bolster GPS strength within a 100-meter radius, had to be used. Today they’re no longer necessary. Lidar — a device that is similar in operation to radar but measures distance by emitting pulsed laser light instead of microwaves — is cheaper now and can be coupled with or even replaced by cameras that can sense objects, similar to how the iPhone camera detects a face. The technology is so advanced today that a mower could have the ability to discern between flowers, weeds and grass.

“(People) are starving for ways to produce more work with the same amount of labor, increasing the productivity of their employees,” he says.

Cuddihe is crisscrossing the country trying to sell the innovative product.

He is targeting manufacturers with stakes in the golf market, like Jacobsen, John Deere and Toro.

If the autonomous mower hits the market, there might be sticker shock. Cuddihe estimates the entire system would be a $25,000 addition. But with the labor it could save an operation, it would be worth the investment, he says.

There are challenges. He’s trying to convince investors without a prototype. Cuddihe estimates a $2.5 million to $4 million investment is necessary for a completed project, which, to him, means getting a product to market.

Furthermore, the technology is vast. To come up with the most affordable solution, NREC researchers want to build a mower specific to the needs of a customer, which hasn’t been defined yet.

“Does it need to work at night? Does it need to work in the rain?” asks NREC’s Legault. “Maybe, maybe not. But the next step is engineering the system for a particular market and a particular application.”

Companies have met with Cuddihe and are interested in the technology, but they’re turned off once they find out there’s no prototype. It has created a chicken-and-egg scenario. To get an investor to believe in a product, he needs a prototype. To get a prototype, he needs an investor.

“Just come to NREC,” Cuddihe says to nonbelievers. “Once people see what’s going on here, they’ll know it’s possible. And once a prototype is built, everyone is going to want a piece of this technology.”

El Santaluz Cinco

Back at Santaluz Club, Miller is now up to a total of five RG3 autonomous mowers working on the course. Four he has purchased and another “loaner” that was intended to be a back-up just in case one mower broke down. Miller couldn’t help himself, and put the fifth mower to work on Santaluz’s greens and 10,000-square-foot nursery. He’s now looking to buy the loaner too because because “everything runs a lot smoother.”

“It’s nice to just set it down on the nursery and come back a couple hours later to a finshed job, instead of having someone mow it,” adds Miller.

The robotic uprising hasn’t taken over Santaluz just yet. Miller was able to hire four more crew members to his staff about a month after he bought the additional RG3s.

“Superintendents need to be patient,” says Miller. “It’s in the early stages, and we need to be supportive of the technology.”

Mower photos courtesy of Cub Cadet