Inside Unmanned Systems recently published an article featuring an interview with My-Linh Truong, RIEGL USA‘s Unmanned Division Manager to discuss the evolution of LiDAR and how drone-based LiDAR is the latest development of this technology. In this article you will see how multiple platform lidar is continuing to grow within the transportation industry for a wide range of applications such as creating 3D maps for roadwork projects, providing the foundation for smart cities and detecting objects for autonomous vehicles.
“It will get to a point where clients who have a mobile-based system driving on highways will have a UAV-based LiDAR in the trunk,” said My-Linh Truong, division manager, unmanned laser scanning for RIEGL USA of Winter Garden, Florida. “After they scan the lanes, they’ll set up the drone-based LiDAR to capture the rest of the terrain and through data fusion merge the two data sets together to really get a full picture.”
Laser scanners can be mounted on a mobile vehicle or drone to scan a right of way, carried on foot to gather data in a subway station, integrated into smart infrastructure designs to enhance safety, or put into an autonomous vehicle for object detection. Today’s LiDAR solutions are lighter and less expensive than those of the past and this is why departments of transportation, government agencies and OEMs are starting to take advantage of the new possibilities. While drones are certainly not meant to replace previously established solutions, they are more cost effective and quick for gaining a new perspective and gathering data in unreached areas.
“As the commercial UAS market continues to mature, more departments of transportation will adopt drone-deployed LiDAR to supplement the data they get from mobile scans,” Truong said. “It will start to become a standard application that adds efficiencies and provides workers with richer datasets.”
T0 read the full article on multiple platform lidar CLICK HERE.
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