All posts by Gavin Schrock

R10 → R10-2 → R12: Explained

The announcement of a new flagship rover for Trimble was met with positive chatter, but with a lot of questions as well. So, xyHt called the product manager… In short, the familiar form factor of the R10 (slim bucket on a pole) is still there, but in the seven years since it was introduced it...

AEC Plus GIS

Above: You can connect to Esri’s ArcGIS directly from inside Autodesk’s Civil 3D. The Autodesk-Esri collaboration continues to lead the way in AEC+GIS with the announcement of significant, direct—and lateral—developments. Now entering its third year, the Esri-Autodesk collaboration launched in 2017 with great enthusiasm, as many practitioners in respective disciplines had been struggling with legacy...

TII Venue

Seen at the YII2019

(YII2019 was held at the iconic Marina Bay Sands in Singapore. Credit: Charles Teng.) Bentley’s annual infrastructure awards and technology showcase was held in October 2019 in Singapore, the city/nation that is widely considered to be the global center of infrastructure innovation. While always an impressive event, this year was less about new products and...

East Meets West Meets East

Above is the object lens for the FOCUS 35, one the largest for robotic total stations with the prism directly attached; this differs from the legacy prism stems that can reduce returned signals. Photos: G. Schrock, from a recent tour of the Spectra factory in Shanghai. Multiple, distinguished legacy companies in precision optics and manufacturing...

GTL-1000

Construction Verification Automation

How multiple companies collaborated to solve persistent challenges to rapid comparisons of design models and constructed features—in high-precision 3D. Image above: the GTL-1000 scanner. When you look at the images in this article, if you see a piece of hardware and think this is a product review, you may be disappointed. It is an impressive-looking...

InSAR Quake rainbow

InSAR Quake “Rainbow”

This graphic, which some folks call a rippling rainbow effect, is part of the valuable post-quake analysis of the 6.4 and 7.1 magnitude earthquakes—and thousands of minor quakes—in the vicinity of Ridgecrest, California in early July 2019. This map—produced by the Advanced Rapid Imaging and Analysis (ARIA) team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena,...