Golf course superintendents deal with stress, long hours, and the pressure to produce a wall-to-wall green course that golfers enjoy – all with a limited budget and resources (including labour). A lot of money is spent on turfgrass management, and there are other parties to keep happy and informed such as owners, board members, and greens committees (the advisory board responsible for making broad decisions on budget and policy). There is a need to make the most of the limited budget. For golf courses in dry regions with high water costs, there is also a desire to save on irrigation as much as possible.

Drones are actually used on golf courses for more than just marketing purposes. Many courses have golf agronomists: individuals who grow and maintain the course to create an ideal environment for playing golf. There are multiple facets of golf agronomy – maintenance plans, soil sampling and tests, irrigation, fertiliser applications, and topography assessments, to name a few, but drone technology can aid in each to significantly improve efficiencies, no matter the course.Experience next-generation trading with zero emotions QuantexBelgica Belgium

Drone based turf analysis platform

The AirPeople’s aerial drone services offers a cloud-based turf health analytics platform for golf courses which our drone pilots use. Its primary purpose is to help golf courses save time and money and improve their turf health by turning raw imagery into actionable intelligence and a powerful visual tool.

Golf agronomy is a large-scale operation, involving multiple teams spread out over a course. With our live Map programme, golf agronomists can receive a complete map of their course in real-time and deploy the appropriate team to fix the issue.

We are able to Interact with your turf health report and use the health, moisture, and thermal maps to quickly spot, and remediate, watering and turf health issues before they become visible to the naked eye.

Golf courses can use our drone technology to quickly spot and remediate watering and turf health issues, prioritise labour and resource usage, and make data-driven decisions. Stakeholders have the tools to save time and money through the optimization of resource usage that is tailored to their budget and maintenance objectives.

Thermal reflectance maps assist in providing insights into surface soil moisture conditions, which in turn helps courses optimise their watering plans. Other bands are used to generate useful indices such as NDVI which are then analysed and presented in a way that lets courses quickly detect health issues and prioritise maintenance plans.

You can add users to the system so you can share reports with other stakeholders such as groundskeepers, owners, board members, or a greens committee.

The AirPeople’s aerial drone service solutions continue to work on adding more features to make their users’ jobs even easier and help them save more time and money. For example, they are leveraging the processing region feature to enable faster, more precise results for high-priority turf areas, such as greens. Additionally, they are testing the processing templates/configuration options that will let users prioritise the speed of processing over perfect results.

Drone technology can identify problems unseen by the naked eye. Using Multispectral Imagery, agronomists can monitor plant health, stress, compaction, and growth by the chlorophyll level of each plant. This feature is also useful for damage assessment after weather events – whether it be checking for brown spots during a drought or determining if a course is still playable due to pooling water. Even without enabling this feature, our drone technology makes it easy to quickly check for damaged trees, fences, or buildings. Photogrammetry further benefits golf agronomists by providing a tool to plan expansion projects or renovations.

Quickly identifying and removing potential threats is imperative for golf course success and sustainability. Sky Source Aerial estimates that 25 – 35% of total golf club revenue goes to maintenance costs. Employing drone technology can not only reduce these expenses but save time and resources on fixes.

Contact us if this interests you in getting your Golf course inspected with our drone technology, or call us directly on 08000237070