Project Description

The process of lining an athletic field is tedious, repetitive, and time-consuming. From the youth to the professional level of sports, field lining is performed manually by humans.  The task requires a high level of precision and human error often produces crooked lines, resulting in a less than ideal field. To our surprise, there do not appear to be any attempts at automating athletic field lining. We are hoping to construct a machine that is able to automatically paint an athletic field by the spring of 2010.

The biggest challenge of our project is the ability to accurately paint the lines. This requires the ability to locate the endpoints of each line to a high degree of accuracy as well as making sure that the lines are straight. Another challenge is implementing the ability to paint multiple athletic fields, including football, soccer, lacrosse, field-hockey, and baseball fields.

We intend to build a robot that would consist of three physical components: two end cars and one paint car. The end cars will use a navigation system using localization methods based on radio interference, RFID sensors, and dead-reckoning. We believe that the combination of position data from these systems will allow us to locate points on the field with high precision. The two end cars navigate to the end points of each line to be painted. A pair of zip wires will connect the two end cars. A paint car, attached to the zip wires, will drive from one end car to the other painting the line as it goes, guided in a straight line by the pair of zip wires.

Our detailed project proposal, including working drawings, can be downloaded here.