Trimble MX-2 - Gonna be fun few days...

So far so good. We have driven 8 routes. I figure the conventional time frame for the corridors driven so far would amount to about 6 months worth of work!

For example, today we drove 5.8 miles of 4 lanes divided state highway with about 8 cross streets intersections and a few cross over turns lanes in 1.5 hours.That time includes driving all lanes, shoulders and all turns and straight through at intersections... So at 750 LF per day that would be 41 days or 8 weeks of topo if we did the job conventionally. We would have also been playing frogger in a 60 mph hilly road and had to deal with traffic control, intersections, paint stripes, etc.

Bam! Done, it should take 3-4 days to process that route.

Side note so far - 248 GB of data. Call me up - Have scanner will travel!

Nice!!

That's the high dollar, Mac Daddy model, correct?

Lee D, post: 415611, member: 7971 wrote: Nice!!

That's the high dollar, Mac Daddy model, correct?

Yes. It is pretty sweet.

Keep us posted about the processing, ground control & what you deliver, I hope not only clouds but also 2d and 3d topo maps?
Chr.

christ lambrecht, post: 415688, member: 284 wrote: Keep us posted about the processing, ground control & what you deliver, I hope not only clouds but also 2d and 3d topo maps?
Chr.

Here is a good video for you to see how the unit. [MEDIA=youtube]TI1NVPAOT-c[/MEDIA]

For 5 of the routes we are driving the ground control consists of targets that are 2'x2' overall with a 6" "L" border. Ill upload a pic later. We observe all targets twice with GNSS for at least 180 epochs and average the observation in the controller. We then run hard levels through the points. One of the clients (Illinois Department of Transportation) requires check shots on the white strip at 500 intervals and wants a comparison in a spread sheet to show a 0.05' tolerance; which is no problem to achieve.

Some of the routes we are driving with no ground control. Once we process the data we will QA/QC the route with hard check shots on various points we choose. Other routes we are driving have a GIS end user application where the client only wants asset inventory (i.e. signage, fire hydrant locations, bus stops, paint striping, pavement condition reports, etc.) For those routes we just drive once, process and export shape files.

This tool is fantastic for us as we have a 5-6 person GIS department and we can map an entire community in a matter a hours, set up the data base, supplement with boots on the ground, done.

The transportation aspect is also great as we process, feature extract and deliver a finished product in Microstation or C3D. We have also done a registered point cloud with the georeferenced images into Autodesk Infraworks for realtime proposal renderings and what if scenarios.

Did I just hear a faint death-gurgle from 1000 mom and pop shops around the world? Mine, included. 😉

I recall Dr. Sarasua having an array of 6 GPS receivers on his research van, back in the late 90's. I understood he was doing corridor studies in an effort to streamline DOT needs. I don't think anyone envisioned how the scanning market would totally destroy the earlier ideas of GPS efficiency.

Nice toy. I'll take two.

I'm guessing someone still has to comb the ground with rtk for buried utility assets such as valves, man holes and vaults, as well as culverts not visible from the pavement. I'm sure it's still an impressive time saver, but it isn't done after scanning and processing alone is it?

We almost got the MX2 but went with LiDARUSA instead. Here's a video from one of our sensors. [MEDIA=youtube]N4JaGtYwrts[/MEDIA]

Yes, Shawn, there is more work after you get the scan done.

StL, How is the registration working out? What do you run for QAQC checks? What is the point density? What software do you run for Extraction? Drop a line if you want to chat. [email protected]

Looks like more mobile LiDAR work is coming up...

But I thought I would share this "Pic from the field" - Look closely at driver

How well does it do off pavement and hard surfaces? That one video shows a Land Rover in a pasture... if the grass is tall and there's leaves on the trees, are you really getting the ground shots? In that particular image the only thing I see that it would pick up accurately would be the fence posts. But I've never used one of these so I don't know how it works. It seems to me that you would be getting the top of the grass, bushes, etc. and not the actual dirt elevations?

Allen Wrench, post: 427025, member: 6172 wrote: How well does it do off pavement and hard surfaces? That one video shows a Land Rover in a pasture... if the grass is tall and there's leaves on the trees, are you really getting the ground shots? In that particular image the only thing I see that it would pick up accurately would be the fence posts. But I've never used one of these so I don't know how it works. It seems to me that you would be getting the top of the grass, bushes, etc. and not the actual dirt elevations?

It would do fine. The MX-2 will collect approx. 500 shots per square meter. At that rate at least 50 points would hit bare earth. You can classify to lowest return and get raw earth.

I would be comfortable with doing an off road topo.