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When it comes to getting the lay of the land on your infrastructure construction site, more options are available than ever before. There are traditional surveying techniques, drones, and LIDAR scanning, which can create an accurate digital model of its surroundings in a few minutes. There’s also mobile mapping, which can gather more than a million data points per second while travelling up to 40 mph.
But the real advantage, according to Topcon’s Ed McCaffery, comes from integrating data from these technologies quickly and easily to get a single cohesive picture. For the first time, that gives site managers the power to know in near-real time the exact conditions on the ground. McCaffery says the goal is “the continual representation of reality in heavy constructions projects.” He shared recent developments in surveying and smart infrastructure on the Innovation Zone stage at Autodesk University Las Vegas 2016.
With so many data collection options, “I’m always…focusing on the right tool for the job,” McCaffery says. “A wrench is a perfectly good tool and I can probably bang nails with it, but if I’m banging nails for a living, I’m probably not going to want the wrench. We have applications for aerial, for mobile mapping, [laser] scanning, there’s traditional survey equipment. And being able to easily, quickly integrate all these types of things will give me the data that I need so that I can actually see what’s out there.”
