A Kilkenny man and his robot are lining out the GAA world games
By COLIN BARTLEY
A KILKENNY man who programmed a robot to line seven pitches for an international GAA tournament just walked away and ‘let the robot do its job.”
Intelligent Marking Ireland’s Mícheál Nolan who lives in Clara, Co Kilkenny, used the robot to line the seven pitches in use for the Renault GAA World Games 2019.
The games are being held at the Waterford Institute of Technology Sports Campus in Carriganore this weekend and will feature 97 teams and 1,300 players.
The intelligent marking robot lined the seven pitches in a day, a job Micheál said would have taken WIT staff a week to do.
“It typically takes two people between 3 and 5 hours to mark a GAA pitch. Our technology did it in less than an hour.
“Lining seven pitches from scratch, some of them on Astro, and getting all of the markings and specs perfect would have taken the WIT Arena team approximately a week. It would have been a nightmare and would have held up the entire grounds staff.
Micheál brought the company’s Chief Technology Officer, Stefan Thilemann, from Denmark this week to oversee the line-marking of the WIT Arena pitches. For the world games, there are noticeable changes to the pitch dimensions.
“The pitches for the World Games are only 100 metres long, as opposed to the normal 140 to 150 metres GAA spec. There are no 45m or 65m lines
“Setting the system up and inserting the required programme onto the tablet and lining the entire WIT Arena campus took only a few hours. We walked away for the rest of the day and let the robot do its job,” Micheál said.
