Shaun Ilten had a problem. The senior director of turf and grounds for the Galaxy and Dignity Health Sports Park had 26 full-size practice fields, two game fields and a warm-up pitch to line ahead of last winter’s Coachella Valley soccer tournament. And he had less than five days to do it.
Since it takes three people nearly two hours to lay out and paint boundary lines on just one field, the math said Ilten wasn’t going to make it.
“It’s just not possible to do it all by hand,” he said.
So he decided to skip the hand part and give the task to a couple of robots, who were able to square out and paint each field in about a quarter the time human hands would have needed.