A golf course superintendent can’t keep a fairway crew, so a robot mower now cuts the fairway at 3AM, guided by RTK GPS accurate to two centimeters, not a buried wire. Here’s how it works.
This didn’t start with a robot. It started with a hiring problem. Wages are climbing, seasonal H-2B visa slots are capped, and a fairway mower isn’t a machine you hand to just anyone: cut the lines crooked and it shows on the Saturday broadcast. A typical eighteen holes carries roughly thirty acres of fairway and rough against only a couple of acres of putting greens, and that repetitive acreage is the work that burns out a crew and a payroll.