NASA reported on August 30 that its Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation (ICESat) satellite splashed into the Barents Sea this morning ending a seven year mission to study the Earth’s polar zones. The satellite’s Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS) was the first laser-ranging (lidar) instrument for continuous global observations of Earth, according to NASA. This Network World article provides more details.
I was contacted by Evon Silvia at Oregon State Univ. where he is working with Mike Olsen in their innovative Geomatics program. Evon is conducting a survey of laser scanner users to see if they are using level compensators. Click here to take the survey.
I would appreciate it if you could help him with his research.
As the Chair of the Data Interoperability subcommittee – E57.04 I am very pleased to announce that our data exchange format has been approved as ASTM standard E2761. This represents over 3.5 years of volunteer work that included weekly calls, incredible donations of valuable time and travel twice a year to face-to-face meetings by a core group of dedicated people.
The challenge now lies in adoption. The market decides what will become a standard – not subcommittees.
If you are a vendor and want to support the standard we have provided reference reader/writer open source software at this website. Please let me know of your intention to support E57.04 and I will add your company name to the soon to be published list.
If you are a person struggling with proprietary laser scanned point cloud data formats then your job is to create demand for the standard. If you request it there is no reason for your vendor not to support it.
Please let me know if you have any questions and we need your support.
I have only recently taken the time to better understand the other disruptive 3D technology impacting the AEC world – machine control. On the construction site this is the new productivity booster, but in fact the technology is also being used in mining, landfills and of course precision agriculture.
The basic concept is to supply a computer on board an earthwork machine with the digital terrain model so that the elevation of the blade or bucket can be automatically controlled in 2D or 3D space. The location of the machine is being determined in real time from either a robotic total station or GPS.
In the most recent edition of Machine Control Online managing Editor and Co-Founder Randy Noland did a little gazing into his crystal ball to see what might result from a combination of laser scanning and machine control. Placing a scanner on the cab of a bulldozer or grader could make for an interesting combination of real time data.
What do you think?
If you have projects in the coastal zone where you need to capture above the water line laser scanned data and fuse it with below the water line sonar, then Reson’s new PDS2000 software program may be of interest. This recently completed integration allows for real time collection and visualization of point clouds and hydrographic data from a single survey line.
This would certainly be of value for harbor and port projects.
Casey Trees is an organization dedicated to “restoring, enhancing and protecting the tree canopy of Washington, DC”. They have a blog – Urban Tree Canopy that reports on the location of UTC projects such as Greenworks in Philadelphia.
The main goal of Greenworks is to plant 300,000 trees in Philadelphia by 2015. They are using LiDAR and satellite imagery to inventory virtually every tree in the city, and make recommendations on areas to plant.
In case you are looking for a weekend project and you have not had your fill of laser scanning and LiDAR have a quick look at the following video.
It looks like size does not matter in the case of this LiDAR research. What I found interesting from this press release was the purpose of the mission – “to test the sensor’s ability to distinguish the various materials, sizes, shapes and colors while providing precision vehicle velocity and position.”
Sounds like automated feature extraction to me. With this kind of talent and funding being applied to the problem, perhaps there is hope.
The first Velodyne LiDAR weighed 100 pounds and was 30 inches in diameter. Velodyne built this unit to guide their autonomous vehicle in the 2005 DARPA Challenge. There was so much interest from the competitors in the LiDAR that Velodyne gave up on building vehicles and decided to go into the scanner business.
Their just released unit the HDL-32E is the smallest, lightest and least expensive model to date. Positioned for the autonomous vehicle and mobile mapping markets my contacts tell me that it is very impressive.
Velodyne continues to innovate in this market
