Chandler school turning to robotics to save money
CHANDLER, AZ (AZFamily) —A worker over at Seton Catholic Prep is far from rusty. “Just a cool wow factor that does a lot of great things for us,” said Jim Shewbridge, the Seton Catholic Prep Athletic Director.
It’s a robot that can paint the lines for sports fields in a fraction of the time people can.
According to Shewbridge, it’s coming in handy, especially during a time when finances are on everyone’s mind. “As a private school, we still try to save money here and there, just like public schools do, and time.”
Previously, the school would have to hire a company to paint, but the cost was adding up with different sports needing their own lines. “The cost saves us about 70% of what we would pay an outside company to come in and do it for us,” said Shewbridge.
The robot uses GPS technology, similar to how cellphones work, to know its positioning.
All you need to do is draw the fields on a digital map, and you can do more than just draw boundary lines. You can also have it paint logos on the field.
This machine is from TinyMobilRobots. Blake Anderson with the company said it can paint a soccer field in less than half an hour and a football field in a couple of hours. Shewbridge said that both of those options could have taken an entire day or longer.
“It’s a convivence thing it also saves people money. Typically you’re saving about 30% on paint and your saving a bunch of money on labor,” said Anderson.
The cost of this painter on wheels isn’t cheap—it ranges from around $20,000 to $30,000. But Anderson says the long-term savings are what’s attracting places from across the Valley.
“Mesa school district has 6 of these things, Tempe union has 2 of them, Gilbert Parks and Rec is one of our partners, and Scottsdale Parks and Rec is one of our partners as well.”
See a spelling or grammatical error in our story? Please click here to report it.
Do you have a photo or video of a breaking news story? Send it to us here with a brief description.
Copyright 2024 KTVK/KPHO. All rights reserved.
