Striping Robots

 I noticed this guy in the parking lot by the ball fields near our house.

It is a Turf Tank striping robot that the City of Issaquah was testing.  I talked with the person running it and he was very excited about it.  The robot can be used for striping on pavement or fields (of which Issaquah has a lot).  They are controlled by a tablet.  While they have a GPS and some simple logic such as angled parking space lines are so far apart and don't run into things, you really need to use the tablet to fine tune how it moves and where to strip a line.

They actually had two of them to map out the parking lot to make the job faster.  The only problem the person had was the robot was not going all the way to the end of the line by the bumper at the end of the parking space.  He figures it will save the city a lot of money as instead of paying labor costs each time they need to stripe fields and parking areas, they map out the field or parking area once and they just watch the robots work.

I checked back a few days later and it looks like they were not able to solve the issue of not getting close to the bumper at the end of the parking space :).