DENVER — Denver Parks and Recreation has a new tool to help them stay on top of maintaining athletic fields across the city: a striping robot.
The robot was created by TinyMobileRobots, a Denmark-based company with a North American headquarters in Georgia. It comes with a tablet that's programmed with field templates for sports including soccer, football, lacrosse and rugby. The only thing a human has to do is decide what field template to use and turn the robot on.
Scott Gilmore, deputy executive director of Denver Parks and Recreation, got to see the robot in action with a demo at Lawson Park Tuesday morning.
Gilmore said one of the biggest game-changers this new tool presents is cutting down on the time it takes to stripe fields.
"The machine is doing the fields at about between a quarter of the time and 30% of the time," Gilmore said. "The soccer field usually takes an hour and a half to do. The machine will do it in half an hour."
If an hour seems like a lot of saved time, compare that to the tall task of striping 12 soccer fields at Central Park.
Gilmore said that job normally takes two people a full day to finish, but that's not the case with the robot.
"Instead of two people taking a full day, it took one person two hours to do the same number of fields," Gilmore said.
Gilmore said all that saved time allows staff to focus more on "detail-oriented things" while the robot is working.
"At the same time, that individual could then go pick up trash, they could go work on the baseball diamond, they can work on the pitcher's mound," Gilmore said. "They could do all the other stuff that needs to be done that they can't do when they're striping."
Gilmore said the robot has a few other efficiency and sustainability perks that come along with it. He said the paint-water mixture used by the robot helps them use 30% less paint on the fields. He said the robot is completely electric, which is a more sustainable option than the gas-powered machines they usually use for field striping.
Gilmore said they are going to buy one more of these robots, with a plan of having each one designated to help out with parks on either the east or west side of the city.
This robot won't completely take the job from city staff who usually stripe the fields.
"There's certain things that the machines just can't do," Gilmore said. "So I think [parks staff] really believe that two of them can really, really help out the team and help them be more efficient."
SUGGESTED VIDEOS: Latest from 9NEWS