At Hexagon Live last month in Las Vegas, the company showed off a lot of their different technologies, whether it be layout tools, handheld scanners, mobile mapping scanners, or any of the variety of technologies for their manufacturing division. In the geosystems area, though, one of the busiest sections of their show floor every time Geo Week News walked through that area was their underground utilities section, with people checking out the latest offerings the company had available for GPR. This is an increasingly important type of technology as infrastructure projects become more in demand, and power systems are rerouted and maintained.
To learn more about how this space is evolving, and how Hexagon is thinking about this evolution, Geo Week News sat down on-site with Matthias Twardzik, the company’s Director, Hexagon Detection, overseeing the development and deployment of these detection tools.
As noted above, this kind of technology is more in demand than ever, something that was confirmed by Twardzik in this conversation, saying that they have seen the demand grow “more and more” over the last few years. While usage was limited to a few specific regions in the past, he says that today they have customers and see adoption everywhere on the globe. He says there are two reasons for this.
“I think the reason is, first of all, because surveying companies now see GPR as an opportunity to distinguish themselves and provide something more in comparison with some of their competitors,” Twardzik told Geo Week News. “Additionally, artificial intelligence has taken another step forward.”
On that latter point, he made the point that in the not-too-distant past, much of this technology was left for fairly niche areas like geophysical companies. The technology was extremely complicated and required vast technical knowledge to make use of it. Today, in large part thanks to advances in AI, the technology is more accessible, can cover larger areas of land, and produces data that is easier to process and interpret, even for non-experts.
As demand for this technology continues to advance, Twardzik believes that Hexagon is in a position to really maximize its place in the sector because of the size of the company. He notes that since he joined – he was with IDS GeoRadar, which was acquired by Hexagon – there have been multiple instances of the detection division taking technology from other areas to improve their own tool.
For example, other divisions were making breakthroughs with neural networks and deep learning algorithm development, and his team was able to collaborate with those teams to apply the learning to their own products. He also mentioned NovAtel, which specializes in positioning technology. The detection team had customers struggling with positioning in urban canyons, and so they leveraged NovAtel IMUs to solve the problem, and now they are a turnkey solution built into their new systems.
Twardzik also discussed the integration of these GPR array systems that can be towed behind a truck with Hexagon’s Pegasus mobile mapping series. We’ve talked before about how integrating mobile mapping and GPR can be beneficial, and it is becoming more commonplace with his customers.
“There is a growing trend,” he told Geo Week News of this integration. “We have customers in France, Italy, Germany, the UK, Asia, and Australia [utilizing this integration]. There is, of course, the investment, so you must have the right project. But once you have that right project to cover the investment and have a return, then there’s no doubt it makes sense.”
Looking ahead, Twardzik sees a future where detection workflows become increasingly integrated, automated, and accessible to a broader range of users. He notes that expanding the use of artificial intelligence across Hexagon’s full detection portfolio, especially entry-level systems, is a priority, as is continuing to build out multi-sensor solutions that combine GPR, cable locators, and laser scanners into unified systems. The ultimate goal, he says, is to enable users with little or no expertise to safely and accurately identify underground utilities with minimal effort.
