Introduction
I had the privilege to speak at the 4developers conference hosted at the National Stadium in Warsaw/Poland.
From the speaker’s room, I saw the grass preparation on the football field. The National Stadium is a modern facility, and I was shocked by what I saw.
Three people were executing the following tasks:
- switching on/off lamps which provide extra light to the grass
- cutting the grass
It does not make any sense to make people perform that simple tasks.
Switching on/off lamps
Automated switching on/off lamps is the easiest quick-win I can think of.
It can be easily scheduled remotely without any “fancy sensors”. There is no need to make humans walk and flip those switches.
There are interesting options to increase electricity efficiency. Adding a few sensors monitoring local light, temperature, and humidity would improve “situational awareness”.
Extending that solution with some image recognition logic would increase the efficiency even further. Every lamp could be independently controlled to optimize the grass condition while using as little power as possible.
The football pitch is a closed environment that simplifies initial setup and operations. The required hardware and software are not rocket science.
Pushing lawnmowers
Three people spend a few hours pushing lawnmowers.
The football pitch has a regular shape and flat surface without unexpected obstacles. Autonomous lawnmowers could operate in those (controlled) conditions without much effort.
The grass would be accurately cut, and people could execute more challenging tasks during that time.
Conclusion
There is no justification for executing those tasks by humans.
Automation would be easy to implement and maintain, more efficient, and cheaper in the long run.
I do not propose firing people who operate lamps and lawnmowers - I am convinced they can execute more sophisticated tasks.
I often read about some extremely difficult ideas to optimize water and power consumption while there are tons of opportunities around us to easily achieve the same outcomes.
