Roxanne the Robot Helps Paint Athletic Fields in Plymouth

In the city of Plymouth, sports are abundant.

Crews maintain nearly 100 playfields throughout the city, many of which require paint.

“Football and soccer are pretty line intensive. They use a lot more paint,” said Jason Goehring, the turf and horticulture manager for the city of Plymouth. “To do it the old-fashioned way would be incredibly time consuming.”

It’s Goehring’s job to get the city’s playfields painted to the exact specifications of the teams using them.

“Our goal is, ultimately, to paint once a week,” Goehring said. “And it really depends on the growing season of the turf.”

It’s a job that’s a lot easier now that they have “Roxanne” on board. Roxanne is the city’s relatively new field painting robot.

Prior to Roxanne, three parks and recreation employees used ropes, a three-wheeler machine and some complicated math equations to apply paint to a field.

“Pre-Roxanne, it was a lot of effort to lay out, let’s say, a soccer field with ropes and painting it with a three-wheeled machine,” Goehring said.

Plymouth crews fill ‘Roxanne’ with paint as the robot puts new lines down on the soccer field at Bass Lake Playfield.

To avoid that labor intensive process, the city paid tens of thousands of dollars to acquire the robot. Now, a project that once took three hours to complete only takes about 30 minutes and can be done with pinpoint precision.

The layout of every field is programmed into a tablet. All that city crews have to do is fill Roxanne with paint and then tell the robot where they are.  

“Once you are on a soccer field, you would pull up the field that you’re gonna paint, hit the execute button, and Roxanne will go and paint that automatically,” Goehring said.

While Roxanne does her thing, it frees up park staff members to do other important tasks.

“I think it’s just a smarter, more efficient way to get work done,” Goehring said.

In case you’re wondering about where the robot got its name, it came from a former city employee who was the first person to operate the robot. While the employee has since moved on, the name “Roxanne” stuck.

Plymouth