Category Archives: Lidar/Imaging

Out of Sight; Not Out of Mind

Cities are now creating their own subsurface utility maps to manage their underground assets. But the lack of an open-based geospatial model means that data are often not interoperable. A new mapping standard aims to fix that. In the years since 2004 when a leaking gas pipeline exploded in Ghislenghien, an industrial town in Belgium,...

A Decade of Uncrewed Photogrammetry

Some might have had a peek at photogrammetry drones before 2013, but for me 2023 marks a decade since I first laid eyes on an uncrewed aircraft that “claimed” to do what I had been doing for years in bigger, more stable airplanes in the joyful company of pilots, copilots, camera operators, and navigators.  In...

Autonomous Drone Mapping

How interior spaces like mines are being scanned and imaged by a drone that works without a pilot or connectivity.  There is a scene in the Ridley Scott-directed 2012 sci-fi thriller “Prometheus” where a deep space exploration crew lands on a planet and discovers an underground labyrinth. They lob a levitating orb down a tunnel,...

Rapidly Mapping Infrastructure

Could a Pittsburgh-based start-up help improve (and save) America’s bridges? Early in the morning of January 28, 2022, a Pittsburgh Regional Transit Authority bus crossing the Fern Hollow Bridge began bouncing and shaking for no apparent reason. Moments later it plummeted into a ravine along with several other vehicles as the bridge collapsed beneath them....

The Future of Aerial Photogrammetry

Rapid advances in technology are changing the way we map from the air, but the 100-year-old technology of mapping by crewed airplanes will continue to fly into the future For thousands of years cartographers made maps using tools that mostly measured angles and distances, allowing for positioning of fixed objects over unknown topography. The earliest...

xyHt Magazine Heights 2023

Click on the cover to view the Heights 2023 supplement to xyHt magazine. Articles in the issue include: From Nadir to Oblique: From traditional airplanes to new-fangled gyroplanes, we take a look at several aspects of the aerial geospatial technologies that just keep getting better. The Future of Photogrammetry: While UAVs continue to emerge as aerial mapping vehicles, there...