"The successful use of laser scanning/high-definition surveying for industrial as-builts was well-documented when our company, METCO Services, first began to look into the technology. Believing that automobile assembly plants in our area might provide fertile opportunities for scanning services, our company demonstrated an early interest in getting into laser scanning. METCO, a moderate-sized civil engineering and surveying company, first began to rent scanners in 1999 from a local instrument/CAD dealer, Sterling Systems, for suitable projects.
Our hunches were correct. The auto companies were definitely interested in laser scanning technology for fast, accurate plant as-builts. Unfortunately, what we didn’t foresee was that those companies were already tended to by a cadre of AE service suppliers who knew their factories well, making it very difficult to compete successfully for this type of work.
Although the plant as-built work did not materialize as anticipated, we remained optimistic about the technology. We redirected our focus on topographic surveys and met with some success. We continued to rent as needed and in September 2003 we acquired a Cyrax 2500 scanner, Leica’s second generation version. We found that for challenging topographic projects the technology was cost-effective compared to conventional methods, but these types of projects were hard to find."
To read more, download this article by Martin Dunn published in
The American Surveyor, January/February 2005 from the Downloads Box.
