Taking Turf Tank — The Field Painting Robot — Mobile in Under a Year

Challenge

Stefan Thilemann, CTO at Turf Tank, contacted us to supplement his team, take it to the cloud, and create a mobile app. Stefan’s requirements were challenging — he requested senior engineers with Flutter/.Net experience — and we were glad to help.

Besides starting from scratch, the KITRUM team had to crack open their dusty school Calculus books and tackle the challenge of taking Turf Tank mobile with an architecture that would allow it to scale.

Solution

From the very beginning, it was a collaboration between Kitrum and the Turf Tank team. Our engineers worked in complete synergy with Turf Tank’s in-house developers.

Before we get deeper into the Turf Tank mobile app MVP, look at this demo video to better understand how Turf Tank works.

So as you can imagine, there are a lot of moving parts. There’s the hardware that powers the line marking robot and the slew of software solutions, ensuring the robot paints perfect lines.

To deliver a mobile app with the capabilities, the Turf Tank team and we used .NET, Flutter, Microsoft Azure, and also custom APIs provided by Turf Tank. With this solution, Turf Tank customers can create user profiles, control the robot (both manually and automatically), and much more.

We used a range of applied sciences such as arithmetic, Calculus, physical science, geometry, and Robotics.

Impact

Since the mobile app is slated to go live July-August 2022, it’s still early to measure the impact. However, Turf Tank’s 1000+ customers can now control their robots through their mobile phones, making it easier to manage and paint fields and a significant selling point.

By separating the software into layers and getting rid of dependencies, Kitrum has created a stable, easily testable app that can scale. For Turf Tank’s customers, this translates to making use of the system more enjoyable because of the UX design we have implemented.

Next chapter

Turf Tank customers worldwide can control, set up, and paint their athletic fields using an easy-to-use Android app. KITRUM is working with the Turf Tank team to this day and will continue to support the team in any challenges and tasks they will have in the future.

The next chapter in development is expanding Turf Tank’s features (still under wraps), improving the API and a lot more.