Early in the evening at Black Desert Resort, the final groups are still playing beneath the grandstands toward the closing greens. On the opening holes, the next day’s preparation has already begun. Large electric robotic mowers move down the fairways with a low hum while play continues elsewhere on the course. By morning’s first tee time, the fairways carry a crisp diamond stripe pattern, laid in straight lines across the bentgrass between the black lava fields.
For the 2026 Bank of Utah Championship, a PGA TOUR stop in Ivins, Utah, that work belonged to FireFly AMP-L100 autonomous mowers. It is the fourth professional tournament at Black Desert with FireFly robots on the fairways, following the resort’s two previous PGA TOUR events and an LPGA Tour stop.
A Fleet Built for Tournament Week
Reef Capital Partners, owner of Black Desert Resort, provided two of their own AMP units for the event. FireFly Robotics, as a tournament agronomy sponsor, brought three more machines to meet the demanding schedule set by the PGA TOUR and course agronomists.
Under normal conditions, three units can easily maintain an expanse like Black Desert’s 51 acres of fairway — one AMP-L100 mows up to 25 acres per charge. Tournament week operations, however, shift to more intense schedules, and host courses routinely add equipment and crew to meet tight timelines and exacting standards. Five mowers gave the team a shorter mowing window and room for the unexpected.
The machines arrived at the Tom Weiskopf-designed course the week before the tournament. As soon as the gallery ropes went up, the team mapped the new fairway boundaries and began setting the stripe pattern that viewers would see all week. This time around, diamonds were the pattern of choice, and FireFly’s QuickPlan™ app optimized mowing paths with its intelligent planning.
Photo credit: Get Wave Media. See video on Instagram.
Precision You Can See from the Broadcast Booth
Straight lines on television start with accurate navigation. FireFly’s Autonomous Mowing Platform utilizes Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) GPS, which is far more accurate than the standard GPS on your phone or in your car, so each mower follows its programmed path with precision, pass after pass. Because the system does not depend on daylight, the mowers hold the same line after dark as they do at midday.
Golf Channel noticed. As Round 1 came to a close, a commentator watching the mowers at work offered a simple verdict: “I can’t cut lines that straight, that’s for sure.”
The cut itself matters just as much as the mow pattern. FireFly units feature premium reel cutting units, the same style found on traditional manned fairway mowers — with some upgrades, to boot. Reels, or cylinders, cut the grass with a scissor action that leaves a clean finish on each leaf blade and a uniform surface for play. Adding to the agronomy team’s careful management of the surface, FireFly’s industry-leading manicure leaves Black Desert’s dense Dominator bentgrass with a carpet-like finish that players and spectators notice. Learn more about FireFly’s cutting units on YouTube.
Robots Working Around the Pros
A Tour event leaves the grounds crew a narrow window to reset the course between rounds. At Black Desert, the mowers run every day leading up to and during the championship, this time working behind play in the evening, before and after sunset.
Those evening hours depend on quiet, especially before the end of the rounds. AMP is battery-powered, so it runs without the noise of a diesel engine and can work close behind play without disturbing players or spectators. With no fuel or hydraulics on board, it also removes the risk of a damaging spill on tournament turf.
Golf Course Superintendent Ken Yates recently reflected on his team’s historic deployment of FireFly’s AI-powered fairway robots in 2024, in an article for GCM Magazine:
“They’re solid. I like that they’re electric. There’s no hydraulic leaks. If you use them properly, you get more out of them. You don’t just send them out the door to go mow. We usually send two, three people out with them. While the (autonomous units) are mowing, the people are edging. We’re combining two jobs. Nobody’s losing jobs. We’re just enhancing the work we can do.” – Ken Yates
Randy Dodson, President and Owner of Fairways Magazine, caught the mowers on one of those evening runs, and noted how they were integrated into the crew’s maintenance work on the course:
Hands-On When It Counts
Under normal conditions, AMP does the fairway mowing while course staff handles other work. One person can typically monitor several units through the FireLink™ app — out on the course or from a desk, or even off-property — and step in only to clear a stoppage or send a unit to its next area. Time spent on fairway mowing often drops by about 90%.
A televised tournament, however, is not your ordinary work week. This calls for a different approach.
The course changes throughout tournament week — Trackman tripods and broadcasting cables often go in after robot mapping is complete, and openings in the gallery ropes may even shift from day to day. Those changes can make Autonomous PathLink™, which lets the mowers drive themselves between fairways, impractical at an event like this.
So the team adapts. At the Bank of Utah Championship, staff stood on the mowers’ standing platforms and drove the robots between fairways, then handed each fairway over to AMP for autonomous mowing. With the high stakes of a live broadcast, FireFly staff and volunteers keep a close watch throughout.
The mowing pattern changed for the tournament, too. Courses typically rotate patterns on a frequent basis to spread out wear where their mowers turn. During the Tour event at Black Desert, the pattern was held steady, only alternating between two directions, so viewers could see the same precise look every round. In this spectacular setting, those straight lines play well against the curves of the bunkers and the rough texture of the surrounding lava. FireFly’s patented steering and drive systems, along with AMP’s carefully engineered weight distribution, make success with this repeated pattern possible by protecting turf from wear, even when the mowers turn in the same places, day after day.
Supporting Utah from Fairways to Factory Floor
Nafe Latu, owner of Freedom Golf and host of the Utah Golf Expo, watched the mowers at Black Desert and wanted to see where they come from. He later toured our production facility in Salt Lake City and shared the visit on Instagram:
“I had the chance to visit @fireflyrobotics today with their CEO, Andrew, and it was a true WOW 🤯 experience.
Seeing the whole process from the very beginning to the finished product and watching how they build everything from scratch, all in-house, was incredible. The vision, creativity, and work behind it all really blew me away.
Thank you, @fireflyrobotics team for the great hospitality, I’m looking forward to what’s next🎉🎉🎉“ (Source)
We are proud to sponsor the Bank of Utah Championship in our home state of Utah, where FireFly founders grew up in a sod farming and landscaping family.
Thank You
We thank Reef Capital Partners, Troon, Black Desert Resort, and the PGA TOUR for inviting us to work together at this extraordinary property. We are proud to support the work of Ross Laubscher, Director of Agronomy for Reef Capital Partners; Ken Yates, Golf Course Superintendent, and Tyler Jolley, Assistant Superintendent, at Black Desert; and Blake Meentemeyer, VP of Agronomy for the PGA TOUR.