Anyone used one of these? I've never seen one for real but going by the specs and Youtube videos it looks like another reason not to invest in an expensive laser scanner, at least for the general surveyor. The price tag is higher than a normal robotic ts but the ability to quickly scan stockpiles, a wall face or anything inaccessible during the course of a survey all from the one instrument could be very useful.
Having sold a few of these, the issue is not the equipment. The issue that stumps most people is the modeling software that comes with the total station.
That said, when Topcon came out with this instrument, many people did not have CAD software capable of handling large data sets. And even though the maximum scan rate of this total station is only 20 points per second, that can still generate a lot of points if you scan a large area in maximum mode.
In the continuous measure mode, even though you are capturing many more points than you do when you give the instrument a defined step interval between shots, it is typically much faster to scan that way than to do the defined interval method. The reason is that in the defined interval method, the instrument must move, stop, shoot, move, stop, shoot... If you hit a spot where you are not getting a return to the EDM it will try for a while before moving on. That can make the scan a good bit slower.
Then there is the tendency to think that if a few points were good, the more you can get, the better off you are. But truly, the fewest number of points that you can capture and still accurately model what you are interested in is the best. More is not better because it often causes issues and confusion in the data management side of things in the office.
The folk who have bought these units from us mostly use the ImageMaster IS software to assemble a coherent point cloud and then import that data into other software to produce the end product. Then you can generate a surface model to compute volumes in a more familiar environment.