Triple I: Innovation in India

Author: Amit Kumar

Indian roads and buildings are ancient. Grand Trunk Road was built across India in 1857 to connect developing civilisations like Harappa and Mohenjo-daro. The public works department of the Maharashtra government wanted to develop, maintain and improve the road condition in India. The government and the consultants turned to Prashant Surveys, a professional land surveying and mapping firm based in Pune, India, specialising in 3D mobile LiDAR survey.

Going mobile in surveying

Surveying is a vital part of the design and construction process. Carrying out topographic surveys for about 2,600 kilometres and delivering data in about two months is a very challenging task, which needs lots of efforts and is practically difficult. Prashant Surveys were able to conduct the surveys in one month using the Leica Pegasus:Two mobile mapping platform and deliver the data from the surveys in one more month. The same project would have taken more than one year to complete using traditional methods.

With Leica Geosystems Pegasus:Two mobile mapping platform, though, this objective was possible after some good training sessions and hands-on experience. Prashant Surveys made a substantial investment in the Pegasus:Two mobile mapping platform and reality capture solutions, becoming the first company in India to adopt this new technology. The firm was able to capture this vast length with a scan speed of 1 million points per second, maintaining survey grade accuracy of less than 2 centimetres.

“We see a huge technological jump for field data acquisition from the traditional total stations to the latest mobile mapping systems,” said Prashant Alatgi, head of Technical and Business Development of Prashant Surveys. “We could easily capture georeferenced, high density 3D point cloud data along with quality photographs, with the average output of about 100 km per day.”

Opening new opportunities

Prashant Surveys was tasked to conduct the highway surveys to:

• support the development of cadastral records for all road side features and build-up structures;
• widen existing state highways;
• align and improve the existing highways;
• create profiles of existing roads, L-sections and cross section of highway corridors.

Along with these standard surveying results, Prashant Surveys also sees further developments for the firm from mobile mapping technology. As the reality capture solution comes with several other features, there are varied mobile applications that apply. For example, the vehicle mounted mobile mapper and above-and-below ground reality capture enables urban and rail surveying for as-built detection, deformation monitoring and more. With trackable health monitoring features, environmental studies can be undertaken. Finally, with wearable reality capture in the Leica Pegasus:Backpack, Building Information Modelling (BIM) is also a possible application to enter.

“With the Pegasus:Two mobile mapping solution, not only are we seeing savings on the cost of manpower, management and all indirect costs associated, but there are also applications we can now enter we weren’t able to before,” said Prashant Alatgi. “The opportunities presented by the technology even further the ROI on our decision to pursue mobile mapping solutions and have been well justified.”