5 ms·

Self driving cars have lowered some LIDAR costs a factor of 20, with a promise of far more. I wonder if this can translate over into archeology and geology. Ims

• notahacker 9y ago
  If you're surveying on a national scale, then the costs of chartering flights (or driving around with drones) is going to keep costs high in the near future even if the surveying equipment itself plummets in cost
  • John_KZ 9y ago
    Eventually we'll get drones to do this job. But first LIDAR needs to get small and cheap enough and large drones must be developed to be reliable enough to fly over populated areas.
• oasisbob 9y ago
  A lot of the cost of doing LIDAR surveys isn't just the LIDAR sensor itself. eg, a typical high-quality survey will involve: - Something like a Leica ALS80 [1] - A Cessna + good Pilot, the plane needs to be really well instrumented. - A team of surveyors on the ground to establish ground controls, and occupy points for GPS RTK calculations - A bunch of post-processing to normalize the data, remove birdies and pits, do ground classifications, etc. (The raw data from the sensor before the processed point cloud is built is really really raw.) A much cheaper approach which seems to be catching on is UAV photogrammetry. It's processing intensive, but no special sensors are required, and in the end you still get a pointcloud. Sensefly is a company that makes these types of UAVs. [1] https://leica-geosystems.com/en-us/products/airborne-systems/lidar-sensors/leica-als80-airborne-laser-scanner https://leica-geosystems.com/en-us/products/airborne-systems...