Collecting golf balls on a driving range is a Sisyphean task that consumes hours each day. But maintaining a steady supply is vital—run out of orbs and the whole operation grinds to a halt.

A Toronto area agri-tech player has come up with a way to ease this pain point. Korechi Innovations, a farming robot manufacturer, has broken into the golf industry with Pik’r, an autonomous range picking solution.

Four years ago the company began exploring golf-related applications for their GPS-driven farming bots, primarily used for seeding, weeding, tilling and soil sampling. While initially envisioning potential overlap in turf management, a more novel idea soon emerged. During discussions with various course superintendents in early-stage market research, the concept of autonomous mowing did surface as an inevitable advancement but consensus was that agricultural giants like John Deere and Toro TTC would be the preferred vendors for such products.

It was at Markham, Ontario’s Angus Glen, a two-time Canadian Open host, that the concept of autonomous golf ball picking, a use-case they hadn’t even considered, was brought up.

The company’s engineers interest was piqued, but they’d never seen one in action before so the team walked over to the club’s driving range to observe the process. They keenly watched a range attendant drive a caged Cushman cart with a golf ball picker attachment in front, hoovering up range balls in a similar fashion to the way a combine header cuts and collects grain.

Returning a week later armed with one of their farming bots and a jerry-rigged hitch, they hooked up to the ball picker, then mapped the driving range so it would avoid yardage markers and bunkers and hit go.

“The thing went out and around the driving range and picked it fairly clean as a Zamboni on a hockey rink. There were 20 people watching: back shop kids, maintenance guys, the superintendent and the pro. They all looked at each other as if to say ‘maybe this is the magic bullet here,’” Jim Clark, Korechi’s chief marketing officer, remembers.

The following years were dedicated to refining the prototype. By the spring of 2020 they were ready to pilot test their picking bot—an agile 700-pound steel mini-tractor. But the onset of the pandemic delayed those plans for a few months. Once golf facilities reopened, they were inundated with new customers seeking a safe outdoor activity and exploring new automation solutions in the middle of a demand surge was not exactly a priority.

Undeterred by the setback, Korechi continued to tinker with their Pik’r, subjecting it to rigorous trials on a range of a private club near their production facility that had graciously allowed them access on Monday mornings when play was suspended for maintenance.

“Over that year we kept going every Monday at 7 a.m. and ran it around—it did cartwheels, fell over, tipped, ran into things and did all the stuff that autonomous products do but we kept making it better and better. Last summer we pulled the covers off it and did a soft release,” Clark said. The Pik’r units only begun to be deployed at clubs and ranges this past Spring.

Thanks to his extensive network of industry professionals, Clark, who had volunteered for his national open for over three decades and served as tournament chair for eleven of those years, harnessed their support to boost awareness. Early videos showcasing a Pik’r in action caught fire on social media, igniting sales leads.

“Within a week last fall, we had thousands of hits on our website from around the world. The interesting thing was it wasn’t questions of, ‘this is the future, one day this is what we will have,’ but ‘when can I get one?’” Clark said.

Employees tasked with ball picking are typically lowest on the totem pole and in a tight labor market, keeping them on is a challenge. While certain courses and ranges evaluated the long term economic advantages of integrating a pik’r robot, most embraced it as a solution to circumvent labor shortages.

Last week, they installed one in Las Vegas and three in California, marking the company’s inaugural U.S. installs. Currently, a dozen units are operating at ranges and golf clubs and that they expect that figure to surge to 200 by the end of 2024.

Rentals currently account for the lion’s share of Pik’r robot revenue but sales are gaining momentum. The units, priced at around $50,000, have begun to attract multi-course operators' interest and these bigger fish have been keener on making outright purchases.

While the range picking vocation may one day go the way of balatas and hickory shafted clubs, the proclivity of golfers on ranges aiming and firing away at pickers as they collect dimple-balled ammunition will certainly remain. Standing up to the rigors of this pastime was actually carefully considered in the Pik’r design process.

“The sides of it are stainless steel and won’t dent and the top is a translucent polymer material because the antennas of the GPS are under it and it’s the same material as the boards of a hockey rink,” Clark explained.

While the machines presently cannot autonomously empty collected balls, future enhancements are on the drawing board and implementing self-dumping capabilities would be the natural next step.