The faster road to mobile data capture

By on 24 February, 2021

Australia’s largest surveying and spatial provider, Veris, adds two Leica Pegasus:Two Ultimate Mobile Sensor Platforms to their fleet.

Veris Australia (Veris), the largest provider of surveying and spatial information services in Australia, is no stranger to servicing large multi-faceted projects. The company has a track record going back 60 years of delivering projects in private and public sectors on a national scale spanning across energy, mining and resources, defence, residential, and retail industry just to name a few.

To deliver market-leading surveying, spatial, design and planning solutions, Veris recognises that digital and spatial technology innovation increases value, enhances the quality and boosts productivity for project delivery. Access to the latest technology allows the company to provide the best quality data and services to their clients as part of their 3D Spatial services.

The Leica Pegasus:Two Ultimate allows capture in a variety of lighting conditions and vehicle speeds.

The Leica Pegasus:Two Ultimate allows capture in a variety of lighting conditions and vehicle speeds.

Going mobile: A case for Leica Pegasus:Two

Veris’ Digital and Spatial team reached out to Leica Geosystems Australia and New Zealand to upgrade their existing Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) systems to increase processing efficiency with the new Leica Pegasus:Two Ultimate Mobile Sensor Platform.

“With the recent improvement of trajectory processing and image acquisition, the Leica Pegasus:Two Ultimate Mobile Sensor Platform was the perfect mix of data quality and functionality for Veris,” said Brad Chambers, National MLS Manager at Veris. “The high-quality image collection adds another aspect to MLS that our client’s value.”

Since acquiring two Leica Pegasus:Two Ultimate systems, Veris have deployed the solution for projects on roads or freeways that are typically more challenging and time-consuming to survey when using methods such as total stations, GNSS or Terrestrial Laser Scanning.

“We believe with the improved efficiencies we are now 50 per cent more efficient on the post-processing of the point cloud data. We’ve become more productive as we no longer need to deploy an experienced operator to site, something we’ve had to do for many years – saving us time and the need to fly to site,” said Chambers.

Veris captures a 3-kilometre-long section of the freeway in Adelaide, Australia for pavement monitoring.

Veris captures a 3-kilometre-long section of the freeway in Adelaide, Australia for pavement monitoring.

With their two new Leica Pegasus:Two Ultimate systems and improved imagery, Veris can capture projects for road and rail pre-construction dilapidation, asset management, crack detection and machine learning applications. The Leica Pegasus:Two Ultimate incorporates two back-to-back cameras creating a 24 MP 360-degree image calibrated to the LiDAR profiler data and allows capture in a variety of lighting conditions and vehicle speeds. Photogrammetry and image quality are impressive with twelve megapixels and onboard JPEG compression.

While there are major productivity gains that come with deploying the Leica Pegasus:Two Ultimate on projects such as capturing high-density 3D point cloud data along with high-resolution imagery without needing to step outside your vehicle, there are safety benefits such as eliminating danger zones and significant safety risks by capturing data without the need to close roads, stop trains, interrupt service networks, and the need to survey at night.

One of the applications the Leica Pegasus:Two Ultimate excels at due to the high-resolution imagery is pavement and road inspection. Veris put this to the test on a recent project involving a 3-kilometre-long section of the freeway for pavement monitoring, to enable the assessment of flexible pavements in highly reactive soil types. The main challenge with this project is that the main section of the motorway was lowered approximately 10-18 metres below ground level in a GNSS-denied zone. With adequate survey control and as-built information (static structures at 20-meter intervals) Veris was able to adjust the point cloud to <5mm of the survey data both horizontally and vertically.

Onboarding the Leica Pegasus:Two Ultimate

One of the most important aspects when evaluating options for a mobile mapping unit for Veris was strong local supplier support, flexibility in adapting the system to different scenarios and an integrated solution for imagery and point cloud capture – Veris needed a single solution that would help them deliver detailed point clouds and high-quality imagery.

Other aspects that made the Pegasus:Two Ultimate the clear standout is that the system does not need to be installed on a specific vehicle. It can fit the standard roof racks and the ability to run the equipment without a power connection to the vehicle, as the system does not require wheel odometers, so it saves time on set up.

Brad Chambers, National MLS Manager at Veris, was closely involved in the decision making and says he knew they made the right choice from the first time they took the unit out the system to site.

“The Leica Pegasus:Two Ultimate was easy to set up on a vehicle, with the connection to the system by Wi-Fi using a Veris owned laptop. We were able to send the equipment to the site and have a couple of surveyors (both had not operated MLS before) install the equipment under an experienced operator’s instruction via screen sharing and Webex,” he says. “A short mission plan was reviewed before the data capture, then a review of the data by the experienced operator before completion.”

 The road ahead for Veris

The efficiency gains are also getting noticed by clients. “We’ve already seen an increase in mobile mapping projects on the east coast of Australia and our clients are happy with the highly detailed data and impressive imagery,” Chambers says. “A key client in Melbourne was amazed at the turnaround time that we were able to achieve to integrate the Pegasus:Two Ultimate data with the Leica ScanStation P40 data.”

“The detail delivered by the Leica Pegasus:Two Ultimate is already providing significant value to our clients across local government, engineering firms and state road/rail authorities,” adds Veris’ Digital and Spatial Lead Nathan Quadros. “As a result, we’re already seeing a noticeable difference in client engagement through additional requests for Veris to build analytics which derive further insights from our client’s data.”

For Veris the survey-grade accurate data available from Pegasus:Two Ultimate creates opportunities to undertake additional and larger projects and grow their service offering. Veris is exploring how the imagery can be leveraged by integrating the multiple pavement cameras for automatic crack detection using machine learning; this will give Veris an additional industry in road analysis that can be leveraged with the Leica Pegasus:Two Ultimate.

Information provided by Leica Geosystems.

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