Drone technology for golf course management
TerraView Solutions, powered by Pix4Dengine are leveraging drone technology to provide comprehensive golf course management services.
Golf course superintendents deal with stress, long hours, and the pressure to produce a wall-to-wall green course that golfers enjoy – all with a limited budget and resources (including labor). A lot of money is spent on turfgrass management, and there are other parties to keep happy and informed such as owners, board members, and greens committees (the advisory board responsible for making broad decisions on budget and policy). There is a need to make the most of the limited budget. For golf courses in dry regions with high water costs, there is also a desire to save on irrigation as much as possible.
Drone based turf analysis platform
TerraView Solutions Technology offers a cloud-based turf health analytics platform for golf courses and drone service providers. Its primary purpose is to help golf courses save time and money and improve their turf health by turning raw imagery into actionable intelligence and a powerful visual tool.
Interact with your turf health report and use the health, moisture, and thermal maps to quickly spot, and remediate, watering and turf health issues before they become visible to the naked eye.
Golf courses can use the TerraView Solutions system to quickly spot and remediate watering and turf health issues, prioritize labor and resource usage, and make data-driven decisions. Stakeholders have the tools to save time and money through the optimization of resource usage that is tailored to their budget and maintenance objectives.
For drone service providers, TerraView Solutions’ purpose is to serve as a turn-key solution that makes it as simple and efficient as possible to service golf courses and provide a valuable deliverable that drives repeated business.
TerraView Solutions powered by Pix4Dengine
Pix4Dengine is at the core of the TerraView Solutions photogrammetry pipeline. First, raw imagery is pre-processed to determine the optimal configuration settings and then run through Pix4Dengine’s algorithms which have been tuned to produce great results for golf courses.
“It was important to us that our photogrammetry engine had strong support for radiometric correction because we want optimal results for any hardware our users choose – especially when analyzing data over time. Pix4Dengine handles this for us automatically.” Adam Jason, Chief Technology Officer, TerraView Solutions
Next, the reflectance maps and orthomosaics are sent downstream to the TerraView turf analysis engine. Thermal reflectance maps assist in providing insights into surface soil moisture conditions, which in turn helps courses optimize their watering plans. Other bands are used to generate useful indices such as NDVI which are then analyzed and presented in a way that lets courses quickly detect health issues and prioritize maintenance plans.
You can add users to the system so you can share reports with other stakeholders such as groundskeepers, owners, board members, or a greens committee.
TerraView Solutions continues to work on adding more features to make their users’ jobs even easier and help them save more time and money. For example, they are leveraging the processing region feature to enable faster, more precise results for high-priority turf areas, such as greens. Additionally, they are testing the processing templates/configuration options that will let users prioritize the speed of processing over perfect results.
