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06 / Laser scanning
LiDAR and 3D laser scanning
Millimeter capture of what is actually there, rather than what the record drawing says was built. A registered point cloud you can measure, section and hand straight to a designer.
Above ground, to the same standard
Geophysics answers what is below. Laser scanning answers what is above, to a tolerance no measured survey by hand will match: millions of points per setup, positioned to a few millimeters, registered into one coordinate system that matches the subsurface work.
Delivered together, the two give a single model in which a buried duct bank and the plant room above it exist in the same space — which is the only way a clash between them gets found before it is built.
Terrestrial and airborne
- Terrestrial scanning — buildings, plant rooms, structures, tunnels, process facilities and interiors. Highest accuracy, and the route for anything that will become a BIM model.
- UAV LiDAR — acreage, corridors and vegetated ground. Laser returns penetrate a canopy where photogrammetry cannot, so a bare-earth terrain model can be produced from wooded and overgrown sites.
Both are our own equipment and our own crews. Solar and wind sites are commonly flown for terrain at the same visit as the magnetic survey for abandoned wells, which saves a mobilization.
What it gets used for
- Scan-to-BIM — modeled geometry from the cloud, at the level of development you specify.
- As-built and record drawings where none exist or the existing set is wrong.
- Volumes and earthworks — stockpiles, cut and fill, quarry faces.
- Clash detection before fabrication, against the real structure.
- Deformation monitoring — repeat scans differenced over time to show movement across a whole surface rather than at a handful of prisms.
Equipment and capability
- Terrestrial laser scanning
- UAV LiDAR over acreage and vegetation
- Scan-to-BIM and CAD deliverables
- As-built and record drawings
- Volumes, stockpiles and earthworks
- Deformation and clash detection
What you receive
Registered point cloud in E57, RCP or LAS, bare-earth and surface models, 2D drawings extracted to your standard, and BIM geometry where that is the scope. Free viewer files so the whole team can interrogate the cloud without a license.
Ask before you commission
Tell us the target, the ground and the constraint and we will say whether this method answers it, whether it needs a second method alongside, or whether something else entirely is the better route. That conversation is free and it is usually short.