Ground-based surveying is a crucial step in producing topographic maps of an area that needs to be used for a building or any type of site. These maps are often produced by hand with a team manually scanning an area from the ground, which takes a lot of time and can be potentially dangerous.
Landborne robots like Spot can automate this process and improve data quality all in less time than it would take a team to do it manually.
How does ground-based surveying work?
- Spot is programmed with a mission path and is equipped with the surveying payload from Trimble.
- Once notified, Spot will awake itself from its dock and start the mission. While its walking around the area it continues to capture data, creating a full picture. Spot will continue to do this until a high-quality map is created, filling in any gaps along the way.
- The data is transferred in real-time to the team, while a higher quality version is stored locally.
- Once complete, Spot goes back to its dock, chargers, downloads the data, and gets ready for the next mission.
Benefits of using landborne robots
- The scanning time needed is heavily reduced with autonomous routes pre-planned and zero need for human interaction.
- Efficiency is increased as humans can be assigned to other tasks.
- Data quality and repeatability is increased thanks too highly accurate routes and the ability to use larger surveying payloads, such as those from Trimble.
Image: Trimble