Category Archives: Surveying

xyHt’s 40 Geospatial Leaders under 40

Join xyHt in Celebrating Young Leadership in Geospatial Professions, Industries, and Sciences!  Who are the current young geo-leaders internationally? And where are they making a difference? There is a maxim:  “We teach children their future, and not our past.” With the exception (in the geospatial realm) of archaeology, forensics, monitoring, and boundary survey (where historical...

The geospatially aware Jackal robots are configured with different imaging and navigation systems depending on the needs of the autonomous application.

Robot Revolution

Clearpath Robotics CEO Matt Rendall discusses unmanned systems, land survey, and robotic industry trends.   The robot revolution is hitting a big milestone. Robotic use is expanding beyond research activities, aerial applications, and industrial manipulators through a new kind of deployment: the service robot. These robots are autonomous, they’re geospatially aware, and they can manipulate...

art of retracement

The Beaten Path

Art of Retracement With a set of eyes that had focused on survey lines through several eras, the Old Man (Glenny Dale, also known as Glutton), took one look at the cluster of three monuments along a right-of-way fence line. The site of three pins at a point where there could be only one legal...

Figure 1 A control traverse example.

I Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Statistics

Surveying Statistics, Part 1 Do you perform GNSS surveys? Do you use OPUS or perform RTK surveys simply because you don’t understand your software’s output? Do you always use the compass-rule adjustment for traverse data simply because that’s the way you have always done it? Do you ever have a situation where you know something...

Ambassador Peter Thomson, Fiji’s permanent representative to the United Nations, presents to the General Assembly the resolution titled, “A global geodetic reference frame for sustainable development.”

A Global Geodetic Roadmap

Above: Ambassador Peter Thomson, Fiji’s permanent representative to the United Nations, presents to the General Assembly the resolution titled, “A global geodetic reference frame for sustainable development.” The United Nations takes up the call to develop a global geodetic reference frame for sustainable international relief and development. Geospatial technologies that have quickly become commonplace and essential in industrialized...

Surveying and civil engineering technology students (left to right: Wyatt Spencer, Brandon Davis, Jeremy Brunell, B.J. Klenke, Jake Blue, and Joe Irey) plumb up the rod before taking a measurement of the shadow in order to recreate Eratosthenes’ method for calculating the circumference of the Earth.

Proving Ancient Measurement Methods

Surveying students calculate the Earth’s circumference by following Eratosthene’s method, with help from modern sources. As part of the Geodetic and Control Surveys class at Dunwoody College of Technology in Minneapolis, Minnesota, we have been studying the history of Eratosthenes and how he calculated the circumference of the Earth. As a class we decided to...