FireFly Automatix welcomes The Santaluz Club as first AMP customer

The Santaluz Club in San Diego, Calif., is the world’s first golf community to deploy FireFly Automatix’s Autonomous Mowing Platform (AMP).

After utilizing three AMP all-electric, self-driving 100-inch-wide professional mowers for more than two months on its 300-acre championship golf course, Santaluz has not only seen increased productivity by using AMP, it now expects to realize annual savings/gained value of about $115,000 a year, according to the company.

The Santaluz Club

The Santaluz Club is a 20-year-old, member-owned community centered around a 7,112-yard, par 71 course designed by Rees Jones.

The club has previously introduced the use of smaller robotic mowers and different internet-connected devices, systems designed to help maintain/support the course. After dealing with challenges such as rising capital equipment costs, the tight labor market, increasing wages and growing environmental concerns, Jeff Miller, director of agronomy at the Sataluz Club, began looking for other options.

“During that AMP demo, there was standing water everywhere,” Miller said. “I would never let a traditional mower operate in those conditions. But with the independent drive system to each of the four AMP wheels, they didn’t spin at all, but just kept a smooth traction. The AMP just slowed down and didn’t rut the fairway. I was pretty impressed, and it was an easy decision to move forward with the AMPs from FireFly Automatix.”

About AMP

First unveiled a year ago at the annual Turfgrass Producers International convention, the now-shipping and now-named “AMP” is a professional mowing platform that was purpose-built and designed from the ground up to be an electric vehicle, not a gas- or diesel-propelled system retrofitted with EV technologies.

According to the company, select AMP technological highlights include:

• Built-in LiDAR-enabled obstacle detection for safety.
• Precise navigation via RTK-corrected GPS services.
• Advanced LiFePO4 battery technology to deliver up to 25 acres of mowing/charge.
• Proprietary cloud-based AMP control and monitoring via a handheld computer tablet to deliver optimized mowing precision, including: exacting, ruler-straight mow pattern options customized for each hole/course and start-and-forget cutting functionality.
• Four independent electric drive motors synchronized with two independent steering motors to achieve low-impact traction, virtually eliminating potential fairway damage.

In addition, the AMP delivers optimized height of cut capabilities in increments of 1/100th of an inch (0.01-in.) and reel-to-reel bedknife in increments of 5/1000th of an inch (0.005-in.).

“Traditionally, we mowed two to three times a week (with diesel-powered, worker-driven mowers),” said Miller. “But with AMP, we’re now mowing six times per week, with our three AMPs completing the entire course in 4-4.5 hours. With those calculations, we’ll save about 2,000 hours per year, which works out to about $50,000 in annual labor costs. However, now that we’re mowing six times a week, if you take the value that we’re gaining (the OpEx costs), we’ll actually double that amount value-wise.

“Then, when we add in fuel savings, we’ll save an additional $15,000 a year in hard costs for diesel fuel. So that pushes our total savings/value gained each year to close to $115,000.”

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