This week Topcon announced their latest 3D mobile mapping system, the IP-S3 HD, which debuted at SPAR International 2015.
“The most exciting thing,” Director of Sales Dave Henderson told SPAR, “is that now we’ve got a smaller design for the hardware, so it’s more compact.” A statement from Topcon touts the system as being light enough, at 35 pounds, that one person can mount it on a vehicle without any help. The company’s listed specs for the system indicate that the rotating LiDAR sensor scans a 360-degree swath at 700,000 points per second using 32 lasers. The system integrates an inertial measurement unit and a GNSS receiver with a vehicle’s onboard electronics as a mean for providing high-density mobile digital imaging. Included alongside is a digital camera capable of providing 30 MP imagery using its six separate lenses.
On top of the hardware upgrade, Henderson highlighted the new software that accompanies the mobile scanner, the Mobile Master Field and Office Software Suite. The new software, he explained, “streamlines the process and the workflow so that you don’t have to use any intermediate software to complete some tasks, like you had to do on a previous system.”
Topcon, Henderson said, has included a lot of the features that they had seen in intermediate software and incorporated it into their own to provide something “more robust, streamlined, and all-in-one before we go to a final deliverable such as a Microstation or an AutoCAD.”
The steps it accomplishes include setting coordinate systems, setting control within the project and tying down the LiDAR data to make it more accurate, as well as trajectory mapping from pass to pass to align LiDAR scans. “It ties all that together in an integrated, automated process.:” The solution, Henderson says, is truly end-to-end.
For more information, or to see the IP-S3 on display, see Topcon at SPAR International 2015.
