Consider the greensmower below.
See the mowing stripes his mower is creating in the background? Folklore says these stripes are due to differences in how the grass is bent. The folklore is probably true but nobody has proven it, much less examined the underlying statistics. So our aim here to do just that by collecting high-resolution pictures of mowing stripes and looking for correlations in the trajectories of the individual grass blades contained therein. You can view our first attempt here. The next time you play a round, consider taking some pictures and sending them our way. Together we will figure this out. Thanks.
- First Experiment : our first attempt, a beautiful summer morning on a green freshly mowed using a riding triplex.
- Second : a sunny afternoon, on a green mowed laterally (with respect to the approach) several hours before. Annotated cardboard templates were included in the photographs for the first time to ease post-processing.
- Sanity Check : if the same area of turf is photographed but at different angles, how does the dominant angle change?
For analysis, we have been using orientationj and orientationpy thus far. The latter outputs some especially artful analysis as shown below using a small snippet of bent grass. This also serves to illustrate how the software calls the angles.
