Glen-Ed Soccer Club uses automation to prepare, maintain fields

This is the second full season for the Turf Tank robots, while the Echo mowers have been in operation since last fall.

“We had seen Turf Tank and it’s been around for about five years. It started in Denmark, and we first saw the units in action at Grand Park in Indianapolis, where they have a massive facility,” Landers said.

“They have lots of grass fields and these things come out of a maintenance shed daily to do their work. Everything you need to control them is on a tablet and you just feed them paint.”

No emissions

After acquiring a Turf Tank robot for the 2022 season, Glen-Ed officials investigated obtaining robotic mowers.

Landers contacted an Echo mower dealer in Chicago (Automated Outdoor Solutions “AOS”) who installs robotic mowers on golf courses, and he told Landers that Echo already had mowers that could mow the fields using a random pattern. 

He also mentioned that Echo was coming out with an upgraded version in the spring that would allow the robots to do GPS-guided system pattern mowing, which was far more efficient.

By September of 2022, Glen-Ed had four robotic mowers.

“AOS did not require the mowers to be purchased as they offered it to us a mowing service,” Landers said. “Instead of having guys show up on a trailer with their mowers, these things will be out here all the time and if we need service, he’ll fix them.

“Since he’s in Chicago, we do a little bit of the maintenance for him, but from a cost standpoint, it was about the same as paying somebody to come in and mow every week. We had a guy who was great, and he would mow whenever we needed it, but it was always a struggle to keep the grass under control.”

Both the mowers and the field liners are eco-friendly and use batteries for power, basically leaving a zero carbon footprint.  The robotic mowers, which require one hour of charging for every two hours of use, can run continuously and the Turf Tank can line fields all day on a single charge.

Glitches in the system are rare, but they do happen occasionally, such as last weekend when one of the mowers stopped moving after apparently bumping into an animal or something else. 

“They have videos on YouTube called ‘Moose vs. Mower’ and the moose do not like these mowers,” Landers said. “I’ve seen one demolish it with its hooves. “For the most part, the deer in the SIUE campus aren’t fazed by the mowers or the Turf Tank.

“When I first got the Turf Tank out, the deer wanted to play with it until it did a jerky motion and scared the deer who now just keep their distance.”

More efficient

For Landers and the crews who used to do mowing and field lining with tractors, strings and push liners, the robotic units are literally a load off their backs.

“Us old guys don’t have the physical strength to do the manual labor anymore,” Landers said, laughing. “I feel 10 years younger now because I don’t have to do the heavy lifting.

“I’m out here tweaking around robots. The beauty of these things is that they weigh so much less than a riding mower, it doesn’t matter if there has been a lot of rain. They’re so light on the field they don’t mess it up because of wet grass. They can mow in the dark and even when it’s raining.”

The units at the Glen-Ed complex are commercial grade for very large areas but robotic mowers for home lawns are also starting to hit the market with many more brands nearing launch.

“The mowers run north, south, east and west, so they go in four different directions before they start back the other way,” Landers said. “They have a smart head that we installed this year so it could do the GPS-guided systematic pattern mowing and it’s connected to a wireless router that works through an internet connection. 

“Because they are so much more efficient, we were able to pay for the upgrade by reducing the number of mowers from four down to three and still have more mowing capacity than we had previously.

“One of our mowers cuts both fields every day and it takes about day to finish it instead of three days with a standard random pattern robot mower. The other mower is on fields that are slightly bigger, and it takes about a day and a half to finish them.”

A video posted by Echo Robotics on their YouTube Channel, shows how Glen-Ed Soccer is using their mowers to maintain the grass.

Drawing the lines

Turf Tank, meanwhile, is the world’s first-ever line-marking robot built specifically to paint athletic fields. On its own and controlled through a tablet, a Turf Tank can paint a full soccer, baseball or softball field in 25 minutes or less and a full football field in 3-4 hours.

Without a Turf Tank, it would normally take a team of at least 2-3 people anywhere from 2-3 hours to line and paint a soccer, baseball or softball field, and upwards of 8-10 hours to paint a full football field.

Currently, Turf Tank has more than 1,400 robots painting athletic fields across the U.S., including several others in the St. Louis area, and more than 1,900 globally.

“The unit we have here can paint a small soccer field in five or six minutes and it can do a full-size soccer field in 20 minutes,” Landers said.

Turf Tank has just released programming that enables the mowers to move at a higher speed.

“It used to be 0.6 meters per second and now it’s one meter per second,” Landers said. “You can increase the amount of paint that is going out per second and as its flies along, you end up using the same amount of paint but what used to take seven minutes now takes less than five minutes.

“It also uses so much less paint than painting the fields by hand. Last year they gave us a supply of paint with our original purchase and we didn’t need any more. The precision is also great — if we repaint a field, the margin of error is less than one millimeter.”

In addition to painting the soccer fields, Landers also uses Turf Tank to paint lines on Glen-Ed’s grass parking lots.

“You could easily use it on asphalt to paint your parking lot with it, so there are so many uses for this technology,” Landers said. “You can also put in different colors of paint if you want to use an elaborate logo on your soccer field, but there’s a separate charge for the programming to develop that and we didn’t feel it was an expense we wanted to pay extra for at this point.”

For more information about Turf Tank, visit

Ready for tournament

Glen-Ed Soccer is preparing to host its annual “3v3 Live” tournament on Saturday, June 17. The event will give the club another chance to show off the high-precision work done by the Turf Tank robot and the Echo robotic mowers.

“It’s a national tour and it also stops in O’Fallon (Illinois), Fenton and Chesterfield and many other places,” Landers said. “We had our big kickoff tournament this spring on our full-size fields with 180 teams and people were stunned by how nice this grass is.

“It rained like crazy the night before and some people thought we might have problems, but we didn’t even have muddy uniforms.”

Because the grass is being mowed continuously, the field conditions are more consistent from day to day.

“We keep the grass at 1¾ inches and that’s a nice playing height,” Landers said. “There are three razor blades on five spinning heads and they’re on swivels. With the upgrade to the GPS-guided pattern mowing, the same mowers can now mow 300% more per day. 

“This has caused the mowing blades to wear out more often than the previous 30-day estimate but Echo has an upgraded blade coming out later this summer that should allow it to last 30 days like before. Changing the blades on the mower is a very easy and takes less than an hour for each unit.”