November 01, 2011 -- StreetMapper, the vehicle-based laser mapping system, has completed a survey along the North West Coastal Highway in Western Australia. Travelling at normal traffic speeds, the StreetMapper system captured survey grade data achieving millimetre accurate measurements of the road surface and roadside features. StreetMapper mobile surveys replace the need for surveyors using tripod mounted lasers along the highway making it a much faster and safer process, as well as reducing disruption for other road users.

Commissioned by the Main Roads Western Australia (MRWA), the government agency responsible for highways and main roads in the area, the laser scan survey was requested by consulting surveyors Hille Thompson & Delfos. The survey route included a section of the main highway, which forms part of the coastal link between Perth and Port Hedland, through the metropolitan area of Geraldton and included offsets from the highway along intersecting roads.

“We were already part way through the project - having to engage third party traffic management and work at night to avoid conflicts with other road users - when we became aware a StreetMapper system was in Western Australia,” commented Edrick Delfos, Licensed Surveyor and Partner at Hille Thompson & Delfos. “Having seen the system in operation in Perth, we realised we had a window of opportunity to put StreetMapper to the test on a real project while saving thousands of dollars, not to mention innumerable headaches, on out of hours working and traffic management.”

Operated by Iain Bramwell from 3D Laser Mapping Australia, the StreetMapper system completed the 8.5 km survey of the main highway plus intersecting roads in a matter of hours, without any real disruption to other road users and during normal working hours. The verified and rectified point cloud (the millions of individual measurements collected by laser scanners) was then processed by Hille Thompson & Delfos to produce string data in conformance with MRWA’s requirements.

“Feedback from our client has been fantastic,” continued Delfos. “In their own words they ‘couldn’t fault the data’ and they have high expectations with allowable tolerances of +/- 5mm on hard road surfaces. We are now looking at other opportunities and partnerships to exploit StreetMapper’s capabilities across the region.”

StreetMapper, which is a joint development between UK based 3D Laser Mapping and German based guidance and navigation specialist IGI, has been specifically designed for the rapid 3D mapping of highways, runways, railways, infrastructure and buildings. Using vehicle-mounted lasers offering a 360-degree field of view StreetMapper enables high precision mapping to a range of 300 metres, a capacity of 300,000 measurements per second per sensor and recorded accuracies in independent real world projects of better than 10 millimetres.

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