I first began my work on a golf course two summers ago. My duties were pretty simple at first, mowing the course, fixing sand traps, and doing daily maintenance duties to keep the country club in quality condition. Halfway through my first summer, I had my jobs down very well and began to get bored with my daily duties. I started to think of ways to know what areas of the course needed work on the most. For example, there was a section on one of the holes that I could tell that the grass was completely different compared to other holes. I wondered what could cause this and how to fix it. After asking the head grounds keeper what happened to the grass, he gave me a simple answer of that it was a dry spot in the grass. No matter how much water was put on this area of the grass, it just wouldn't soak up the water. These patches come and go, but sometimes they are hard to see from just a few meters off of the ground.
    I was a sophomore when I first started to work on the golf course and didn't have much background on a way to solve this issue. It wasn't until my junior year UAS (Unmanned Aerial Systems) class that it all clicked for me. In this class we built and flew our own UAS's along with ones that the school had purchased. I thought that it would be much easier to find distressed areas on the country club if I was able to fly one of these system's over the course, that's when this whole project came together. Going into my senior year I was able to set this up for my capstone project and with the head grounds keeper. After presenting this idea to the head grounds keeper he became excited with the possibility of this happening.
    The first UAS that we flew over the country club was the Iris system. This UAS used the gems camera allowing us to capture pictures while in flight.

Fig. 1 This is the Iris UAS that was used for the first flight over the country club for data collection.

With this simple camera attachment, it would allow us to see the distressed areas of grass. The Iris has a relatively short flight time so it was difficult to fly a large area, typically one hole per battery. Right after we flew the country club with the Gems camera, a brand new multispectral camera came in called the MicaSense RedEdge. This new camera had five multispectral bands along with a infrared band.
    The second time we flew the country club we once again flew the Iris system along with the new RedEdge camera. Although the first camera would allow me to show the distressed areas after processing and some tinkering, the new RedEdge camera would allow me to show it much easier. The RedEdge camera would allow me to use infrared bands to show these distressed areas. After flying the Iris system we decided to put a relatively new UAS system called the DJI Inspire into the air. The RedEdge camera could not be attached to this system so we used the Zenmuse X5 camera that came with the Inspire. This camera had 16mp allowing for much better picture resolution. Another benefit of flying the Inspire was that the battery life per flight was much longer allowing for much more data collection.

Fig. 2 This is the DJI - Inspire that we flew for the second flight over the Country Club

    The purpose of this project was to be able to find areas of distress on the country club using these different systems and cameras. This would allow the grounds keeper to focus efforts on these areas allowing for a more pristine golf course.  This information not only benefits the grounds keeper, but it could potentially benefit sales reps for fertilizers for the golf course as well. By being able to show this information to them, they could either scale back or scale up the amount of fertilizer that is used and even a specific kind. This information has the potential to save golf courses thousands of dollars and not let materials go to waste on areas that are not in distress. What started out as an idea while I was sitting on a mower one morning, turned into an interesting project with many money and time saving benefits.