Survey Equipment

[particlerealities]

Our company is in the market for site survey equipment. We have a guy that travels all across the country surveying new locations for many of our clients. Right now he photographs the entire space, interior & exterior, then field-dimensions the entire space, hopes he doesn't miss anything, then comes home (or back to the hotel) and draws up the space as best as he can before traveling to the next location across the country.

What equipment is out there that some of you may be using, know about, or have experience with? I've seen one tool that will photograph a space and build a 3D model that you can walk around in - this would be a great asset when the architectural team is trying to decipher the survey and build out their construction document set. I know there are other devices that laser scan the space, but I've not personally researched them. Our guy that does surveys has researched this stuff a bit, but I've been asked to help him with the research since he is pretty busy traveling.

I'd greatly appreciate your feedback and suggestions if you have experience with this stuff.

[Neilg]

I had no idea people still did surveying without a lidar. generates a perfect point cloud of the environment. take photos too, build 3d over point cloud manually.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/12/wtf-is-lidar/

proper ones by faro & leica can run up to $100k and is for large distance super high detail scanning, but the past couple years a lot of very affordable $500-$1k portable & user friendly scanners hit the market.

your tool that does this from photos is photoscan, but while it is impressive I would not use this without accurate survey to line it up to as there's no promise of 1:1 accuracy and no way for it to understand scale.

this is an example of the best one money can buy - http://www.fltgeosystems.com/laser-s...FQ5MDQod6X8K9w
3mm accuracy at 50m away, for large scale civil engineering & records color.
and in constrast the $350 one - http://scanse.io/
which you can see the results are pretty difficult to parse. there's a wide range of everything else in between depending on what you need.

[particlerealities]

Excellent info Neilg - thank you! I assume some of these will allow you to somehow shoot the space from multiple positions to survey around corners & columns, etc.?

[Neilg]

not sure about the super cheap $350 option, but the proper surveying ones are designed to be moved around to add more detail to a single point cloud, yeah

[sjmoir]

This Leica looks cool:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLUQen5A4dY&t=15s

Presentation gets a little awkward at the end but it's pretty impressive.

[rusteberg]

lasted about 5 seconds watching that....... ended up here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_I6rw85aLU ...... met my daily quota of procrastination