Locals angered by council’s purchase of £13,000 GPS robot to paint football pitch lines: Witness says ‘two blokes stood around’ while bot did job easily done by single worker

•  Locals slammed the council’s decision to buy the robot as a ‘kick in the teeth’

Furious taxpayers have blasted a local council for splurging £13,000 on a hi-tech droid to paint lines on football pitchs, leaving council workers ‘standing around watching a robot’.

The advanced gadget uses GPS technology to mark out the lines of two football pitches in under an hour, but residents in Maidstone, Kent, are not impressed.

Locals have slammed the council’s decision to shell out thousands of pounds on the robot as a ‘kick in the teeth’, after Maidstone Council increased the burden on households by the maximum three per cent earlier this year. 

Locals says that the money could have been spent on more urgent needs and infrastructure projects that residents say they desperately need. 

Father-of-three Paul Penny, 47, said he saw council workers standing around, with their hands in their pockets, as they watching the robot working. 

https://youtube.com/watch?v=X-pONqEEcNQ%3Frel%3D0%26start%3D24

Danish company, Tiny Mobile Robots, who are behind the droid says that the droid line marker has been used to mark out 1.6 million fields around the world

He told The Sun: ‘My thoughts were, ‘£13,000 for public ground where it’s only kids and Sunday football played…are you kidding me?’

‘If it was a football club selling tickets for matches to pay for that sort of technology — OK. But it’s not.

 ‘It’s a kick in the teeth when you see two blokes standing around watching a robot paint lines that they could quite easily paint themselves’.

Mr Penny said that residents were frustrated in the council’s failure to invest in its infrastructure, while increasing its demand for council tax.

The borough also collects money for Kent County Council which hiked up its demand by the maximum 4.99 per cent earlier this year.

Mr Penny said that he was not seeing money being spent in a reasonable way. 

Maidstone Council insists that the gadget is a time-saver for staff, allowing for a more efficient use of time other tasks

The local authority told The Sun that the robot was capable of marking out a field in 45 minutes – cutting it down from the usual two hours it would take a human being

Danish company, Tiny Mobile Robots, who are behind the droid says that it has been used to mark out 1.6 million fields around the world.

The droid is controlled through an app, with over 200 sports templates that can then be dragged onto your desired location on Google maps, before hitting start. 

Maidstone Council insists that the gadget is a time-saver for staff, allowing for a more efficient use of time other tasks. 

The local authority told The Sun that the robot was capable of marking out a field in 45 minutes – cutting it down from the usual two hours it would take a human being using a traditional line marking machine. 

It added the use of this robot was not intended to replace the worker but to increase efficiency, as well as the number of duties they could carry out.

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