Equipment World Digital Magazine
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/816045
April 2017 | EquipmentWorld.com 44 jobsite technology | continued To order, call (800) 430-4540 or visit www.equipmentworld.com/roady-order-form Email: roady@equipmentworld.com Roady_EW_halfpage_EW0415.indd 1 3/25/15 8:52 AM Scan buildings, rooms and interior spaces as fast as you can walk them T ech savvy contractors have been using GPS sys- tems to survey and map outdoor jobsites for more than a decade. But once you move indoors, it's back to the old tape measure and clipboard. GeoSLAM Zeb Revo is a new product that can do for indoor building measurements what GPS did for outside survey work. (SLAM stands for Simultane- ous Localization And Mapping.) The hardware for GeoSLAM is a handheld, rotating laser device and a backpack battery. The worker simply turns on the device, picks up the laser scanner and walks one loop through a room. The laser scans and records all the 3D properties of any room up to 98 feet in size, in addition to the structures in that room. The data is assembled into a point-cloud rendering and shared over the cloud making it compatible with BIM (building information models) CAD programs, GIS modeling and other collaborative platforms. Once the data is collected in the fi eld, you drag and drop the fi les to the company's uploader, or if you want to skip the cloud route, you can pay a one- time fee and process the information locally without having to seek an internet connection. The com- pany's software renders the scans into 3D, centimeter- grade maps that can be used with most CAD programs. The benefi t of using GeoSLAM is speed. A per- son operating the device can create a full-blown, 3D map of any inte- rior space, including many large buildings, as fast as he or she can walk the fl oors. In addition to buildings the technology can be used to map mines, caves and forests where the tree cover is too dense for GPS signals. – Tom Jackson The rotating laser scanning device creates a point-cloud, 3D map of spaces as you walk.