RIEGL 3D Terrestrial Laser Scanner On-Board Monitoring Solution

RIEGL Laser Measurement System GmbH has been manufacturing laser scanners for a wide range of applications for more than 20 years. The high accuracy and reliability of their long-range measurement is based on RIEGL’s unique technology of echo digitization and online waveform processing, which means that the laser scanners operate even in poor visibility and demanding multitarget situations caused by dust, haze, rain, snow.

The RIEGL surveying equipment provides highly accurate 3D data for a wide range of applications, including bathymetry, monitoring, archaeology, topography and many more. For all these applications, RIEGL provides various sensors to carry out surveys from an aircraft, from a UAV, from boats, mobile mounted on a car or classically from a tripod as a terrestrial laser scanner.

We would like to take a closer look at the latter and the latest developments in the field of terrestrial laser scanners, especially with regard to surface monitoring.

The latest hardware processing architecture enables execution of different background tasks (such as point cloud registration, geo-referencing, orientation via integrated Inertial Measurement Unit, etc.) on-board in parallel with simultaneous scan data acquisition.

This on-board data processing capability can also be utilized within apps running on the scanner for customized data-processing workflows. RIEGL offers the so-called “Mining Apps” as a bundle, including the Monitoring App, the Design Compare App and the Slope Angle App.

The Monitoring App calculates changes to a given reference scan. This allows to detect movements of e.g., highwalls long before they are visible to the human eye. The interpretation of these movements through a time series of scans allows the prediction of a possible slope failure. The Design Compare App works similar to the Monitoring App. Instead of a reference scan a given design model defines the reference. As a result over- and under-cut to the given design model are visualized. The Slope Angle App calculates the local slope angle from the scan data and visualizes the results color-encoded.

All of these apps produce a web browser-based result (Fig. 1). The web server runs on the scanner hardware, allowing the user to view the results with any standard web browser without installing additional software. Alternatively, the result data can be automatically synchronized to the cloud for worldwide publication on a website.

Fig. 1 Web Viewer Result Monitoring App

Furthermore, a Scheduling App allows defining complex scheduling tasks for scan data acquisition. This also enables the automatic monitoring of prisms. An auto-generated csv-file containing the coordinates and range of the scanned prism is ready to be utilized in any standard prism monitoring software solution.

These new developments for on-board data processing and the generation of automatic, web browser-based end results open the door for permanent 24/7 monitoring with RIEGL laser scanners.