Robot Golf Caddy: Follow-Me Trolleys and ABB AMRs

A robot golf caddy is now something you can buy, not a gadget from a trade show. Electric trolleys that follow you down the fairway with lidar, and range robots that collect balls through the night, are showing up at ordinary clubs. This post traces the job from the boys who carried bags around the first courses, through golf carts and electric trolleys, to today's follow-me machines. It also looks at the navigation ideas they share with ABB's Flexley Mover mobile robots, and what still stands in the way.

A caddie tends the flag on the green at the 2022 Curtis Cup, Merion Golf Club, Pennsylvania. Photo: Michael Stokes / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Caddies, carts and the first electric trolleys

The word caddie came into Scots in the 17th century from the French cadet, a junior army officer, and later meant anyone who ran errands. By the 19th century it meant the person who carried a golfer's clubs. For a long time that was a job for local boys and men. They carried a canvas bag over the shoulder, found lost balls, read the greens for their player and earned a fee per round.

Caddies with their players' bags at Baltusrol Golf Club, New Jersey, in the early 1900s. Photo: Bain News Service, Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The first attempt to take the weight off people's backs was the golf cart. One was custom built with an electric motor in 1932, but it did not catch on, and through the 1930s and 1940s carts were mostly used by golfers who could not walk far. In 1951 Merle Williams' Marketeer Company in Redlands, California began building electric golf carts, E-Z-Go followed in 1954 and Club Car in 1958. By the mid 1950s the golf cart was widely accepted by American golfers.

An E-Z-GO RXV Elite golf cart. E-Z-GO began building golf cars in 1954. Photo: TaurusEmerald / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Golfers who wanted to walk got their own machine in Britain. In 1983 Joe Catford and John Martin launched the PowaKaddy Classic from a small factory in Sittingbourne, Kent, an electric trolley that pulled the bag while the player steered by the handle. Later models added remote controls, digital displays and GPS course maps. The trolley still needed a hand on it or a thumb on a remote, so the player stayed in charge of every metre it moved.

The PowaKaddy building on the Eurolink Industrial Estate in Sittingbourne, Kent, where the company is based. Photo: David Anstiss / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Follow-me trolleys and range robots arrive

The newest trolleys drop the remote. In a September 2026 review, Breaking Eighty tested the MGI Ai Navigator Halo, which starts at $2,599 and adds a $399 lidar module called Halo Eye that tracks the golfer's body rather than a signal from a remote. Its Geo Protect feature keeps the trolley out of areas a course marks as off limits. The reviewer says about one golfer in four at his club now uses an electric caddie, and the bag room ran out of space to charge batteries. Rivals include the Gozo Auto-Follow and the Stewart Golf Q-Follow.

A folding three wheel golf push trolley, the basic design that electric follow-me caddies motorise. Photo: R-E-AL / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Clubs are adding robots behind the scenes too. In September The Golf Business described Wayrobo's WayPick 2 range ball picker, which runs up to 10 hours on a charge, covers up to 50,000 square metres and can collect as many as 40,000 balls a day. It uses satellite positioning with RTK correction plus inertial sensors, works at night with lidar and headlights, and empties its own basket at a dock. Autonomous mowers are also spreading: FireFly mowers cut the fairways at a PGA Tour event in 2024, and Rye Robotics raised $4.5 million in September 2026 for driverless golf mowers.

FireFly autonomous reel mowers on the fairways for the PGA Tour's Black Desert Championship in Utah, October 2024. Photo: Lawnjunkie / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

ABB does not make golf trolleys, but its Flexley Mover AMRs solve a similar problem indoors. The P603 and P604 find their way with AI based 3D Visual SLAM, building a map from camera images and placing themselves in it without reflectors or changes to the building. ABB quotes a positioning accuracy of plus or minus 5 mm for the P603, which can carry up to 1,500 kg. A follow-me caddy has to do something close to that on grass, while also tracking one moving person. Any link between ABB's mobile robot work and golf is a possibility, not a product. For outdoor relatives, see our post on garden and lawn robots.

An ABB Flexley Mover P603 AMR, which navigates with AI based Visual SLAM. Photo: ABB

Where robotic caddies are heading

For players, the next step is probably a caddy that knows the course as well as it knows its owner. Today's trolleys already carry GPS hole maps, and adding yardages, slope warnings and automatic parking beside the green is mostly a software job. Prices should fall as lidar gets cheaper, but at roughly $1,500 to $3,000 a follow-me trolley is still a big purchase, so I would expect resorts and clubs to offer them for hire before most players own one.

An electric golf buggy on St Mary's in the Isles of Scilly, 2012. Photo: Pinback66 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

For course operators, the gains are in the work golfers never see. Range picking, mowing, bunker raking and moving supplies between the shop and the halfway house are repeat jobs that suit a mobile robot. The same planning tools used for factory fleets, such as ABB's AMR Studio, which sets up missions with drag and drop tools instead of code, show how a mixed fleet could be scheduled around tee times. More on that style of setup is in our guide to controlling robots with no code. Our post on sidewalk delivery fleets covers the coordination problem in public spaces.

An ABB Flexley Mover P604 among wooden pallets; it finds its way with 3D Visual SLAM. Photo: ABB

Safety is the big open question. A trolley that follows a person must not roll into a pond, run down a steep bank or bump into another player, and reviewers make a point of testing them on steep hills for that reason. Factory robots handle this with certified functions such as ABB's SafeMove and force sensing on the GoFa cobot, which stops on contact, and ABB's P603 mobile robot is built to meet the ISO 3691-4 standard for driverless industrial trucks. A golf trolley does not come with that kind of certified safety function. Clubs will also need staff who can maintain a fleet of robots, which most clubs do not have today.

ABB's GoFa cobot is guided by hand and stops when it senses contact. Photo: ABB

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