Roaming around a driving range retrieving the endless scattering of golf balls is a pretty tall order for staff, especially when you consider the bays full of weekend hackers taking aim at their caged buggies. But one company is looking to give golfers a smaller moving target to aim at. The Ball Picker robot autonomously scoots around sucking up golf balls and returns them to a ball dispenser to be teed up once again.
The Ball Picker is said to be capable of detecting areas of the range with high ball density and work in near silence as it uses polyethylene disks to scoop around 300 in each cycle.
Once at capacity, the robot makes its way back to a retrieval ditch where it releases its load and recharges. From there, the balls are funnelled into a washing system and fed back through the dispensary. The system is designed for ranges covering an area of five to seven acres (2 to 2.8 ha) and can apparently collect more than 10,000 balls a day.
The Ball Picker forms part of a larger automated range maintenance service offered by its maker, TrueBots. This includes BigMow, a lawn mowing robot that trims grass, collects the cuttings and redistributes them as mulch.
The service is offered as a monthly plan tailored to each facility based on the ball output of the range, with quotes available via the source link below.
You can check out the company's promo video below.
Source: TrueBots