12-06-2025
Turf Tank transforms field painting at Total Sports in NY
ROCHESTER, N.Y. (WROC) — If you're ever at Total Sports Experience early one summer morning, you might catch a glimpse of an unusual assistant on one of the many soccer fields.
This little robot is called a 'Turf Tank.' Affectionally known to employees there as 'Frank' — the GPS-guided robot lines and paints athletic fields with centimeter accuract.
There are 14 soccer fields at Total Sports Experience, half of them with double sets of lines, so the Turf Tank paints the equivalent of 21 fields every week.
Management said it typically takes two guys about two hours to do the job. Turf Tank can do it in about a half hour. It can also paint a field from scratch, and all you have to do is pick a starting corner.
'We did a Gaelic football tournament here a few years back, and didn't have that field before lined or anything, but the tablet really just picked a starting point and let it go — and it painted it on it's own where it probably would've taken us a full day to paint it by hand,' Total Sports Experience General Manager Jamie Hammond said.
Turf Tank was named one of the best inventions of 2024 by Time Magazine.
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