Article Information Sciences

Development of Laser Scanner Units for UAV

In its i-Construction policy, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism has stipulated a manual for public surveying using by UAV photogrammetry with the aim of improving productivity at construction sites. However, UAV photogrammetry requires a huge amount of time to generate point cloud data from photographs, causing a problem that it is difficult to monitor the daily progress of the construction site. There is another problem that it is incapable of taking measurements except daylight hours. Against this backdrop, we have been developing laser scanner units for UAV equipped with LiDAR, IMU and GNSS receiver. Then, we clarified the error factors that are expected to affect the precision prescribed of point cloud data and summarized the requirements for the onboard equipment and the method of generating point cloud data. However, we have not yet proposed nor developed the laser scanner units as well as for generating point cloud data considering these requirements. Thus, in this paper, we developed the laser scanner units and a new method for generating point cloud data within the laser scanner units to optimize the error factors based on these requirements clarified in the existing study.

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Technical Article Others

3D Point Studio: Utilization Platform for Point Cloud Data

As Laser measurement technology has made remarkable progress in recent years and the means of measuring the three-dimensional shapes of road spaces as point cloud data have diversified, point cloud data has been measured and accumulated throughout Japan. Point cloud data is useful as a means of accurately grasping the present shape and is expected to be utilized for a wide range of purposes with i-Construction as a turning point. Existing efforts have promoted development of new technologies and open data, steadily increasing opportunities to use point cloud data. However, it is difficult to use point cloud data wisely in accordance with its intended purpose because it is merely a vast set of points that indicate locations in space and does not hold information about the features indicated by the points or about their relationships to other points. Therefore, it is essential to develop an environment for utilizing point cloud data. In this study, we develop 3D Point Studio, a platform for utilizing and sharing 3D data including point cloud data by utilizing area data. The usefulness of this research will be confirmed through examples of applications in the actual sites, and its future development will be discussed.

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