Category Archives: Lidar/Imaging
Mexico City’s Transportation Revolution
Using drones, lidar, and BIM, enterprising surveyors and geospatial engineers designed and constructed the city’s first high-speed train system. Editor’s Note: Lessons learned from a problematic rail project in Mexico City prompted an initiative to pull out all technological stops for a subsequent new rail line. An innovative, tech-savvy firm that had demonstrated its capabilities...
A New Line
Midway through a large and complex transportation project, a team of Belgian surveyors successfully adopted a new class of instrument. Hardware and software modernization doesn’t always yield immediate benefits for enterprises, and sometimes taking a particularly big leap or risk comes at a premium in time and labor. But sometimes everything goes smoothly. Our July...
Monitoring a Historic Bridge Replacement
A survey manager describes how monitoring improved construction processes for the replacement of an 85-year-old bridge connecting Illinois and Iowa. The Savanna-Sabula truss bridge added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1999, carried passengers along U.S. 52 and Illinois 64 over the Mississippi River, connecting the towns of Savanna, Illinois, and Sabula, Iowa....
Lidar and The Lost City of the Monkey God
The timing was uncanny; I had just finished Douglas Preston’s The Lost City of the Monkey God when news of another major, new, lidar-enabled archeological find in Central America broke—at the same time I was attending the International Lidar Mapping Forum (ILMF) in Denver, Colorado. Then, while I was attending Teledyne Optech’s product presentation at...
What I Saw at ILMF 2018
ILMF is an outstanding conference for all things lidar, including airborne, terrestrial, and underwater, as well as new remote-sensing and data-collection tools and technologies. I try to attend every year because it never gets old; there are plenty of new and exciting technologies, both on the exhibit floor and in the many workshops and presentations....
UAVs and Laser Screening: Friends of Foes
Some professionals predicted doom for terrestrial scanning right when inexpensive drones with calibrated cameras hit the market and new image processing software wowed audiences with cool 3D mesh models of statues. But how have things actually turned out? I recently interviewed key industry users and vendors who are deep into both technologies – here’s what...