Category Archives: Lidar/Imaging

Huge Airport, One Vehicle

Inventory of roadway and airfield assets, including pavement surfaces, using the “One Vehicle” collection approach. Dallas Fort Worth International Airport (DFWIA) is the second-largest airport by land mass (27 square miles) in the United States and the third-busiest airport in the world by aircraft movement.It can easily be considered a city of its own. With...

OS 3D GIS Urban Canyon GNSS

Improving GNSS in the Urban Canyon

To prepare you for the this blog post, I wish to point out that I am a geospatial expert and can hold my own around the ins and outs of survey, so going to an event at the Ordnance Survey on “3D mapping for the improvement of GNSS in urban areas” was an eye-opener. You...

Assessing the Potential

UAS-based Topobathymetric Lidar Surveys Understanding stream channel and floodplain morphology is critical for a number of efforts—from hydraulic modeling and stream-restoration design to aquatic habitat assessment. These applications require description of conditions both inside the channels and in the adjacent riparian zones. Gathering these data has typically relied on individuals on the ground or in...

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....