Artificial intelligence is taking over our lives and in golf it is no different. Brands like Cobra now use it as an essential part of their golf club development process.
They utilise AI to work through hundreds and thousands of different weight configurations when developing their latest drivers. It’s a tool to help engineers identify the combinations that best meet their performance targets.
And, said Doug Roberts, Cobra’s Vice President of Research, Development and Innovation, on the Your Golf Podcast, AI has been incorporated into the development and design of the OPTM driver range.
“So with the POI (Product of Inertia), that’s something that we used quite a bit to to optimise it, and what we do is we take each one of the four targets of the golfers that we’re after: the low spin, the X, the high MOI (Moment of Inertia) K model, and the draw model.”
How AI is used in the development of Cobra’s driver range
Roberts explained AI helped Cobra explore different ways of structuring the set-up in each of the heads.
“We said (to AI) if we want to optimise each one of these metrics for this player, here’s our target, and then here’s a bunch of mass. Tell us where this mass should go and where this weight should go in the driver.
“You could see all these dots moving around rapidly of moving weight here, this combination of weight there, and we went through hundreds and thousands of iterations until we got the dialled in, optimised POI, MOI, centre of gravity and weighting for each one of those drivers.”
One of the biggest benefits of AI for brands like Cobra is the speed at which engineers can now assess different possibilities.
Instead of manually working through every potential configuration, AI can analyse thousands of iterations much more quickly.
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“It sped up the process. It was a way for us to analyse thousands of iterations quickly,” Roberts added.
“We definitely saved weeks of time. We were able to do within hours what would have taken weeks.”
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What do you make of the use of AI in golf club development? Do you game any of the Cobra OPTM drivers? If so, which model do you play? Let us know in the comments or by leaving a post on X!
