Land Surveying Video Guides

Speaker 1 (00:00)
Have you ever wondered how they decide where to put a road that cuts through the mountains or where they decide to put a dam that makes a reservoir? Well, all this and more is covered in the subject of land surveying. And today we're in Northern Colorado at seven, 500ft, and we're going to take you on an example. People of doing land surveying with an unmanned LiDAR system. So stay tuned and learn all about it and more on today's video. Let's go. All right.

Speaker 3 (00:39)
We're Loading up the truck. We've got all the gear here today. We're going up to the mountains in Colorado. We got a job where we're doing a LiDAR survey of a local watershed in order to generate a digital elevation model and contours. And we're delivering this to a civil engineering firm who's going to use this data in order to make plans for work they're doing along the roadway. Let's continue to load up the truck and get going.

Speaker 1 (01:25)
Well, we just pulled up starting to rain here before we start flying today, I want to tell you, basically, we have a whole system for doing these lighter land surveys. And they consist of these three basic big steps. The first step is we have to go out and get ground control points and set up aerial targets. And the second step, we plan and fly the mission. And then the third step, we take the data from the first and the second step back to the office. We process it together.

Speaker 1 (01:49)
But before we do any of that, we got to get out of this rain. And we're going to use some of this time to go and inspect and Scout out the area before we start flying.

Speaker 2 (02:08)
Walking the job site.

Speaker 1 (02:09)
Right now, you can see behind me there's a lot of trees. The client wants no trees in the data set. So it's just these topographical map of only the ground. And we also need to find a good place to go take off and land from. All right. This looks like an ideal place to fly from. And what makes us a good place is that there's no overhead obstructions, like trees or power lines. And we have a really good view of our whole flight plan. So let's go ahead and jump into our first step and that's setting up the base station and starting to collect some ground control points.

Speaker 1 (02:59)
So this right here, this is our base station, and it's going to be collecting data the entire time route here. And this is the GPS Rover. It's communicating with the base station at all times enables you to get two centimeter precision on all the data it records. Now, to tie this into the sky, we need to paint some aerial targets that will be visible to the light. Our data recorded from the drone, this aerial target will show up very bright in that light.

Speaker 3 (03:25)
Our data.

Speaker 1 (03:26)
Now let's record the accurate location of where this is located. Got it. So we just finished capturing our last drown shot point. Now we can go back to the drone, plan the mission and take off this right here. This is the LiDAR. Let's get it installed here. Now we can go ahead, start flying and getting data. We're in the sky right now flying 100,000 laser pulses every second.

Speaker 2 (05:06)
Once it's done with this flight line, we're going to bring it home.

Speaker 1 (05:08)
Land it, switch out the batteries and pop it back up. All right. We just finished doing that drone flight. Got all the LiDAR data, got everything packed up. We're going to head back to the office now, process the data and show you all what it looks like. Let's go back to the office.

Speaker 2 (05:32)
Welcome back to the office. We just got done flying the LiDAR drone and collecting the ground troll points. And now we're taking both those data sets, putting them together to derive our results. So let's go ahead and just jump right into that and take a look at that raw point cloud data.

Speaker 4 (05:47)
Here we have a look at that first LiDAR data. It looks freaking awesome. So right now, what you're seeing if you don't know, this is the raw point cloud data. The red is high, the blue is low and the color is depicting elevation. If we scroll around a little bit, you can see a lot of detail, a ton of detail in this data. This is what you're going to get with unmanned aerial LiDAR data collection. It's very high resolution.