Skip to main content

Laser mapping speeds up survey measurement

British scanning company 3D Laser Mapping is hoping to benefit from a £3 million ($5 million) fund announced recently by the UK government for police forces to purchase laser scanning technology for accident recording and investigation.
February 21, 2012 Read time: 2 mins
British scanning company 1639 3D Laser Mapping is hoping to benefit from a £3 million ($5 million) fund announced recently by the UK government for police forces to purchase laser scanning technology for accident recording and investigation.

Use of scanners and point cloud software to collect data is speeding up traditional survey measurement and, on motorways particularly, this can save hours of disruption when traffic is held up, a major benefit to the economy. Laser scanning works in low light, night conditions and bad weather and collects far more data than a total station.

3D Laser Mapping has already supplied one of the UK's road death investigation units with equipment, in this case a Riegl VZ-400 which can produce high quality graphics and detailed plans of collision scenes for court use.

The company claims greater detail and colour compared to other laser scanners.

The VZ-400 has echo digitisation and online waveform analysis for a high performance with accuracies claimed of 5mm at ranges of up to 600m measuring up to 122,000 points/sec in a 100 by 360° field of view.

The evaluation of multiple targets combined with a reliable, robust and lightweight construction makes the VZ-400 also suited to civil engineering the firm says.



















For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • VIDEO: Telstra drone LIDAR maps Melbourne’s EastLink Mullum Tunnel
    April 13, 2018
    One of the applications for LIDAR is to make high resolution 3-D maps. Self-driving cars are pre-loaded with a LIDAR map of the trials area in which they are permitted to fully self-drive themselves. The cars also have their own LIDAR scanner which captures a real-time LIDAR view of the vehicle’s surroundings. The fully autonomous driving system within these prototype cars compares the real-time LIDAR view against the pre-loaded LIDAR map to significantly increase the accuracy of their self-positioning
  • Software mapping takes on hard-to-tackle air pollution problems
    June 15, 2018
    Software mapping of air pollution along transport corridors is an important weapon for improving air quality, argues Arne Berndt*. Although power plants and factories play a large part in increasing air pollution globally, traffic is now the largest single contributor. Commercial vehicles account for a significant share of traffic around the world, with freight volumes projected to grow 40% by 2050. Yet, despite modern vehicles being more environmentally friendly than earlier models, the sheer volume of th
  • Weigh in motion technology reduces road damage
    February 8, 2012
    Overweight vehicles cause enormous damage to road structures but they can be caught, even at high speed. Weigh-in-motion or WIM devices are designed to capture and record axle weights and gross vehicle weights as vehicles drive over a measurement site.
  • Autodesk introduces new software tools
    April 25, 2013
    As World Highways was going to press Autodesk was due to announce the 2014 versions of its entire range of programs including AutoCAD, Civil 3D, NavisWorks and Revit Structural and others programs used by the road industry. As previously, they are packaged in suites; Standard, Premium and Ultimate. Key aspects focus around the inclusion of a completely new and fast point-cloud “engine” developed from the Alice Labs company acquisition made last year. Part of a new Autodesk Recap, standing for reality captur