When we think of technological advances in golf we usually think of drivers, irons, putters or even golf balls.
Seldom, if ever, do we associate technological advances in the sport with how we pick up balls off the driving range or how golf carts are powered.
Yet, that’s what’s happening right now in golf in Canada and beyond, as the robot Pik’r and the solar powered SunRunner golf cart are creating a buzz.
Here’s the story of these two Canadian made innovations.
PIK’R
Sougata Pahari is not going to encourage you to try and hit his autonomous little robot with your tee shots when you are on the range working on your game.
But he also knows that with all the times that you have tried to bang your shots off the caged tractor as it drives around the range, you’re going to try and hit his robot as well.
That is why his Pik’r, which may soon replace that caged tractor at many ranges, is small, but powerful and is made of stainless steel. Hit away.
Originally from India, Pahari moved to Hamilton when his wife got a job at McMaster University. Sougata Pahari was an inventor and had a background in robotics and wanted to develop his own business in Canada. He started working out of the McMaster Innovation Park where he had the idea to develop a robot for agriculture.
It was described as a small tractor, about the size of a go-cart, that was developed to work as a general utility vehicle for farm use, carrying things, tilling, seeding soil sampling etc.
While he was having some success with it, it was not taking off as he had hoped it would. That’s when someone at the Innovation Park suggested it might have an application in the golf industry, specifically pulling a mower.
Because Pahari had no connections in the Canadian golf industry someone at the Innovation Park suggested a former colleague, Jim Clark, who has connections everywhere in the sport in this country.
“I called a few superintendents that I know and they all felt that autonomous mowers would someday be there because of labour shortages but they were going to wait for John Deere or Toro, the giants in the industry, to bring it out,” said Clark.
“The superintendent at Angus Glen, at the time, asked if we thought it would work with the ball picker on the range.”
It was at the very least an interesting question. After all, you could argue that driving the tractor on the range is one of the most critically important jobs at any golf course or driving range, and one that is often given to someone who has very little training.
“We talked to one person who owned a small driving range and he told us that he had trained 10 kids to drive the tractor and they had all quit,” said Clark.
“And if you run out of balls on the range at a big country club what are the members going to say? In that case the assistant pro would probably have to jump on the tractor.”
Keeping those thoughts in mind Pahari and his team went off to make some changes.
“We jerry-rigged a hitch to be able to attach the actual ball picker to the robot and took it back out to Angus Glen,” said Clark.
“We plotted out the driving range by GPS, hit the go button and out it went on their range up and down, back and forth, picking up balls and proving that it worked.”
That was the fall of 2019 and they took their project back to the shop, which by now had moved to Oshawa, to make the new application for their robot work even better.
Of course, Covid hit in 2020 which meant for the next couple of years testing and more testing and revisions replaced visiting potential customers.
“We ended up over-engineering it to accommodate the worst ball pickers and to push the heaviest loads,” said Clark. “We engineered a high-end, top-quality product. And it’s not hard to program,” he said.
“There’s an app for that,” Clarke explains. “We have a digital satellite picture of your range and we program the robot to go around the yardage signs, to miss the bunker and the guy-wire holding up the light pole, or any other obstructions.
“When it’s full or finishes its circuit, it comes back to a hold position and sends a notification to the pro shop and they send someone out to retrieve the balls.”
The Pik’r made its public debut at Tee Zone driving range in Oakville, Labour Day of last year.
“That was a good test for us because they had the biggest and heaviest ball picker on the market,” said Clark. “It holds 4,000 balls so it was a wonderful pilot.”
Tee Zone liked it so much that they are using one this season.
Korechi Golf, the parent company of the Pik’r, is currently taking orders to rent the unit.
To learn more about The Pik’r and even see a video, you can go to their website at www.korechi.golf
SunRunner, solar powered golf cart
They did not set out to design one of the most innovative new golf carts in history but that’s where Gina Succi and Emil Radoslav and their team at Westhill Innovations in Simcoe ended up.
In fact, they had just created a small solar powered transport truck when they asked themselves: “now that we have this, what are we going to do with it?”
One of their staff joked: “we could cut it in half and put it on a couple of golf carts.”
That is when the light went on – the solar powered light bulb, of course.
To get to the SunRunner solar powered golf cart, however, you need to go back to the beginning.
“Both Emil and myself worked in the steel industry for Dofasco in Hamilton,” explains Succi. “We left Dofasco and founded Westhill Innovation in the latter part of 2016-2017.”
They were inventors and entrepreneurs whose whole focus was to find ways to reduce fuel consumption in any sort of vehicle by making them lighter and in so doing help the environment by reducing CO2 emissions.
“One of the things I had always thought of doing was integrating solar into a composite, but solar technology wasn’t advanced enough at the time,” said Succi. “All the panels were made of glass and glass does not work well in a transportation application.
“There have been a lot of advances in solar technology in the last 10 years, however. We can now take the best advances in solar technology and in lightweight materials and combine them and make panels for transportation.”
Succi admits that solar powered golf carts had been tried before but failed for several reasons.
“You can’t take a rectangular flat, glass panel and put it on a golf cart and expect it to last for a long time,” said Succi. “We knew you had to make it damage resistant and give it some style and that took some time and research.”
They rolled out their first protype in 2020 just around the time Covid hit. Whistlebear in Cambridge agreed to run it that summer while Westhill collected data.
“What we found was that it was almost completely self-sustaining,” said Succi. “They practically never had to charge it. It just ran all the time. And the batteries themselves last a lot longer. It really is a life preserver for the batteries.”
Last summer they ran pilot projects with two carts at MontHill in Caledonia and another two at The Briars in Jackson’s Point.
“The feedback we were getting is that they could do three rounds of golf and at the end of the day the cart would still be 80 per cent charged,” said Succi.
“They required less maintenance and they didn’t have carts dying on the 16th hole.”
The unique look of the cart, with a roof that somewhat resembles a race car, is to create a large solar panel with angles that allow both water to run off and with a large surface area aimed at the sun.
Westhill does not build the carts, they basically take existing carts and add the solar technology, including a new roof to it.
“One of the challenges in getting this into the golf industry is that the results are so good that it makes the carts last longer,” said Succi.
“Because most golf courses don’t own their own carts, we need to engage the leasing companies.”
And if you’re not sold on the concept yet keep this in mind.
In our cold climate golf carts still need to be charged over the winter months even when they are not running and generating revenue. If you had a fleet of 30-40 SunRunner solar powered carts, you could park them outside the clubhouse over the winter and hook them up to a battery bank. They could generate enough power to potentially take the clubhouse off the grid.
“If you had a fleet of 80 carts you could produce 32 kilowatts,” said Succi.
The focus for Westhill, in the short term, is to concentrate in the personal-use market like cottage country, as well as university grounds, hospitals and other similar areas, while putting together a marketing and sales strategy to use in the golf market.
“We’re talking to courses for next year,” said Succi. “It is all a timing thing with the golf industry with regards to when they would typically order for the following season. It’s going to take one or two courses to get on this and then it’s going to take off and really go.”
