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Best Practices in Forest Topographic Surveying using Robotics Total Station
a-harris replied 4 years, 5 months ago 19 Members · 32 Replies
Thanks for the tip.
Still do that – the light can be behind a band of foliage – the rod cannot.
There is no easy way. Good if you can do them “leaf off” between November and April. That probably isn’t an option in the Phillipines. Undergrowth here in the PNW is often probably almost as dense as it is there.
2 person crew usually works best. And frequently the instrument is out in the sunlight and the rodman is deep in the woods. So the Rodman can see the gun, but the instrumentman can’t see the rodman. Therefore the rodman is in control even more than usual.
You only need the tiniest hole to get a shot. Get your eyeball right next to the glass to position it, and the glass, so that the instrument can see the glass. Guide the the instrument man to aim at the sound of your voice to get close, then robotically search for the glass. Lock on, get shot, and move on.
A human eye will live with the prism being off-center, but a robot needs to have a certain “picture” before it will allow it to consider itself locked in.
Therefore, robots suck in leaves and obstructed views. Best practices is to buy an old GTS-510 Topcon and put a guy with good eyesight behind it. If you can see any part of the mirror, you are good to go. The newer the gun, the less likely to “burn” through, in my experience. And a robot is basically a boat anchor in the woods.
-All thoughts my own, except my typos and when I am wrong.I have found that robots do not meter well through leaves but our old Topcon GTS3b burns right through.
It takes a skilled 2 man crew with many rod height changes to do it right.
Ain’t that the truth. Give me an older manual total station and good I-man over a robot for traversing through dense woods any day.
WillyI like the trees and so do all the local planning authorities. So I’ll pass on that. But there are some great things along those lines for clearing underbrush.
@norman-oklahoma
Have a very similar rig working for me right now. We are side-trimming a tree row and taking out a few trees that are directly on line for replacing a fence that was already in place prior to 1944.
Not a fan of overgrown weeds (trees) that serve no productive purpose. Get a few too many and the idiot out of state hunters show up and think they can hunt anywhere they want. Those idiots are at the very top of my personal $h** list.
Back about 1990 a client asked if I had one of those things that could shoot right through trees. I finally discovered he had misunderstood what another surveyor had told him a couple of years earlier. The surveyor was referring to shooting random spots by finding little gaps in the leaves. The client’s memory was that the gun could actually shoot straight through a tree trunk. How sweet would that be? Of course, that would mean it could also shoot straight through the rodman, the prism and almost anything else.
In the early 1980s, the company I was at got a Topcon GTS? and Carlson Surveyor1 software and Apple Writer on an Apple II computer and we were immediately getting 3 times the work done and more on some projects. We set meander monuments and tied them in on a 250+ acre lake that was 10 miles long in two weeks.
About 6months later a competitor was mentioned in a half-page article in the local paper about his superior equipment that would revolutionalize his business to the next level and leave every other surveyor behind. He was quoted in saying that with his new Zeiss instrument, they did not have to cut brush anymore. His new Commodore computer with COGO program and dot matrix printer was the fastest office equipment made. He was sounding like a politician and making false promises and giving fake information all thru the article.
After that, the first words from every client were “do you have that new gizmo that you can measure with and not cut any line?”
I have never seen any TS that would burn thru foliage, trees and leaves and cedar or pine.
We just laughed it all away and I’ve never been able to catch up with all projects that come my way before that and especially after the TS and computer software came my way.
????
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