£40,000 robot used at Eton could make Shrewsbury sports fields pitch perfect
A £40,000 line-painting robot could make sports fields pitch-perfect as Shrewsbury Town Council begins drawing up budget plans for next year.
The council has trialled the machine at Shrewsbury Sports Village, and the authority's finance and general purposes committee was told it would bring "a massive saving in time and effort over the course of the year".
The robot uses satellite positioning to mark out sports pitches prior to use, and is one of a number of potential projects being looked at ahead of next year’s town council budget, a draft version of which is expected to be brought before the council in January.
Danny Powell, the council's acting operations manager, said at a meeting on Monday: “From start to finish on the pitch at the Sports Village, it took the machine 24 minutes for a task which would normally take a member of staff around three hours.”
The system is currently in use at Calderdale Council, which maintains a similar number of facilities in West Yorkshire, and various other locations across the country including Eton College and Aston University.
Currently, one full time member of staff spends around 60 per cent of their time on line-marking sports pitches across the town, which could potentially be cut dramatically by use of the automated machine, the committee heard.
The system could also offer potential savings by reducing the amount of times sports pitches need to be re-painted between periods of low use.
“It gives us more time to do other things and it may give us the ability to use that new technology to be more productive, and innovative,” town clerk Helen Ball said.
Councillor Julian Dean said: "It sounds positive – it’s possible there will be a substantial saving in staff time so it could free up staff to do other things.” added
The authority currently maintains 64 football pitches along with other sports and recreation facilities across the Shrewsbury Town Council area.
Plans for the town council’s 2024-25 budget are currently in the development stage, ahead of a draft budget which is expected to be presented at a meeting of the full council on Monday, January 29, 2024.
