Getting from Today to Tomorrow - Safely

This is the time of year where safety becomes more personal, perhaps because of family holiday travel. This December, I find myself on the campus of Penn State at the Transportation Engineering and Safety Conference (TESC) promoting safe data collection using Terrestrial Mobile LiDAR Scanning (TMLS). The flight to Penn State started with an unexpected celebrity aboard, University of Nebraska Athletic Director, Tom Osborne. I began absorbing the football theme this trip appeared to be taking. I quickly realized the lesson the universe was throwing at me was going to be about teamwork.

The keynote speaker at lunch was Pennsylvania Department of Transportation Secretary, Barry Schoch, He addressed an audience of 500 other safety-minded professionals telling them they have “a duty to apply technology to transportation safety working as an industry with a collective set of ideas and technologies. You have to show a willingness to reinvent yourself.” Then, like a 52- yard field goal Schoch went on to say, “Collectively we have to be willing to try new ideas, to push the envelope as a leader in safety”. 

Push the envelope! All of a sudden I was in the huddle getting pumped for a play that was coming my way! “Pushing the envelope” was a term that has guided me my entire career as a surveyor and into LiDAR technology. Pushing… What is the technology designed to do?... What can it do?.... What else can it do?

How refreshing to hear my shared passion for safety that promoted teamwork. Schoch understands what I have been promoting for many years about LiDAR technology and the industry. He said we must embrace change as surveyors, engineers and the public driving sector, he called “shareholders”, as it applies to transportation safety and the role of technology. Instead of worrying about the past ways of approaching issues think more about the new tools that provide opportunities for a better, safer outcome.

Schoch went on to say that with immediate results… showing immediate return… the funding will support it because “the only way to get from today to tomorrow is by providing immediate benefits”. How refreshing to hear my shared passion for safety that promised support through teamwork and backed by funding.

TMLS is the tool that takes surveyors safely out of the red zone during data acquisition. As the vehicle moves at highways speeds unobtrusively in traffic it is also safer for the traveling the public. No lane closures, no roadside distractions and no stopping. The immediate benefits reach beyond survey grade accuracy at traditional survey cost. After all what is the cost of saving one life?

From all of us at Terrametrix we wish you and yours a safe holiday season.

Monumental Pangaea: GIS and Surveyors

By Michael R. Frecks, PLS

Early in my survey career, the popular definition of GIS among surveyors was “get it surveyed.” The accuracy of GIS simply wasn’t deemed high enough to be of interest.

Boy did we miss the boat. At the recent Esri International User Conference in San Diego, we saw an effort to bridge that gap; however, there was still a separation between the two groups of about 1,800 feet. The Survey Summit was a valuable resource held at the Hyatt in San Diego, while the user conference for GIS was hosted in the convention center down the street. Even a two-day overlap in scheduling seemed to limit the linking of these interwoven yet separate professions.

Frankly, I don't even know how the professions got so far apart. A Pangaean philosophy seems as prevalent today as what our profession saw 30 years ago. Mount Rushmore, which is often described by the surveying community as “three surveyors and some other guy,” hails from a time when the profession gave high value to citizens. Today, it seems the other guy is winning; attorneys and politicians are set in stone as the respected profession. The average citizen probably deals with surveyors only once or twice in their lives, when purchasing their homes (if then). Conversely, GIS technology is in front of the public every day through consumer GPS devices and a media blitz of GIS information.

Consider what the situation will be like 30 years into the future. Will GIS and surveying be farther apart or closer together? Although politics deals with territories, where is the art? As younger generations come on board, the line will become more obscured. It is a continental drift we cannot ignore.

In San Diego, there was a noticeable difference in the age of attendees between the GIS venue and the Survey Summit. (I’ll admit I was part of the seasoned surveyor group.) This difference only points to the influx of young professionals who are interested in mapping and is not indicative of a dying profession. It does, however, denote a change in mentoring regarding the art of surveying. The earth is dynamic, and so must be the professions that measure and mark its features.

On both sides, software has played a part in rifting the professions. Methods and resources presented at the 2012 Esri conference are revolutionizing the way both professions work. What today is overlap will soon be separation. We must remember where we have been to know where we are going.

By the way, those three surveyors on Mount Rushmore—Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln—blazed trails for railroads and exploration. How thrilled they would have been to have attended the Esri conference! Today, surveyors are primarily caretakers for boundaries, while GIS has become the trailblazer for innovation.

Overlap is a good thing.

The Persistence of Memory in Technology

By Michael R. Frecks, PLS

One of the questions clients often fearfully ask me is, “How much memory will this project require?”

Surreal as the persistence of memory may have been to writers and artists like Salvador Dali, from the 1920s, the movement has now reemerged in the technology age of data storage. As our ability to collect hundreds of thousands of measureable points per second in standard .LAS or other proprietary formats increases, managing and serving LiDAR data is becoming a growing concern.

These large point cloud datasets often are accompanied by massive amounts of megapixel images, video and metadata, which add to the file size. To the inexperienced end user, this is enough cause for concern to avoid embracing the technology. We first saw this fear in the early days of static scanning when the data was turned over as the deliverable in its large, cumbersome raw state. The question from the client then was, “Now what?”

Although technology has seen the progression of data storage devices (external hard drives and internal data servers) from kilobytes and megabytes to gigabytes, terabytes, petabytes and exabytes in just a few short years, ease and access has increased while cost has decreased. The options now afforded us on our cell phones are perfect examples.

During the extraction and processing of point data into useable/traditional CAD drawings, advanced software now serves up the data in byte-sized portions instead of entire project overload. This allows for speed and efficiency that even a laptop or mobile device can manage. Programs such as Terrasolid and Certainty 3D’s TopoDOT are a couple of examples for the transportation market.

Project management trees and standard naming conventions are already in place within surveying and engineering firms. This makes organization of the 3D point clouds and accompanying data an extension—another branch—within the project tree.

Data capacity, too, can be handled in a multitude of ways. External hard drives, servers and offsite storage systems are offered in as many different solutions as there are people. Each has its own benefits and drawbacks. Offsite storage is often touted as more affordable; however, with the price of adding storage in house on a server, the costs wash out to about the same (roughly 15 cents per gigabyte). And while offsite storage is advertised as secure, it requires an open pipeline through the Internet that may make it more difficult to protect from computer viruses. (The recent Flame virus is an extreme example.) I’m not saying your data is any less or more safe in the cloud than in your office. But you have to consider how much control you want.

Truth be told, art does imitate life. There is a correlation when it comes to LiDAR data storage and the symbolism of time and space in Dali’s “Persistence of Memory” (1931) the digitizations of his companion piece, “The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory” (1954). Easing clients’ concerns regarding LiDAR storage and usage is not unlike Dali’s melting watches symbolic of space and time. How much space, and for what period of time?

How Wide is a Point?

I have been reading a lot of banter about accuracy and precision which brings me to this “point”. Errors in measurements can lead to a wide range of issues in the survey profession. The sum of the potential error equals something I like to call “our error budget”. How big is your budget? First let’s look at the three types of errors that add to that budget.

Gross errors, also known as blunders. This type of error can be of any size or nature. They generally occur due to carelessness of the person doing the measuring, like writing down the wrong value or measuring between the wrong points. This error can be reduced or eliminated by using good procedures but transposing numbers is not uncommon.

Systematic errors are errors that can be mathematically modeled and hence corrected. They are caused by using a different mathematical model than that which exists in the real world. A good example of a systematic error is using the slope distance instead of the horizontal distance. This type of error can be reduced by using the correct and complete model.  An incomplete model will add to your error budget and cause the final measurement to be skewed.

Random errors also have an effect on the measurement but have no apparent cause. This type of error is the small differences between repeated measurements of the same quantity. They can be reduce or eliminate them from our measurements by statistical procedures. One example would be to create a mean value for a measurement to be used for a later measurement.

Now I’m no mathematician or statistical wizard, but I have been around the block a few times in the error buggy. Feedback from others in our profession has always been sharp to criticize a procedure but have also been faster to adopt a procedure once it has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. This reminds me how some of the latest talks have pointed to the issue of “can scan data produce results that are more accurate than the published specifications of the scanner?”. Now for the answer… “YES” This is because there are many points that are being used to solve the position of a point. In other words we can use the power of averages to solve the final position.

The term survey accuracy can be confusing, misused and politicized especially when a layman is involved.  Although the fields of mapping and land surveying have benefited greatly from technology there is still the resounding question of accuracy in cadastral surveying based on measurements or law. There are accepted errors in the National Spatial Reference Systems (NSRS), the Continuously Operating Reference Stations (CORS) and the horizontal and vertical control stations maintained by the National Geodetic Survey (NGS). There are errors in the equipment, human errors introduced by the field surveyor, and accepted errors in the technology. But never before have we dissected and expected such precise accuracy in our profession until we knew we could obtain it. What was accepted as standard practices with traditional surveying in the past is now not good enough with current technology. The days of dead reckoning stood less criticism than .02’ laser scanner acquired data. Chaining has become obsolete which reminds me of a story about the old man that approached a survey crew. The old man asked the crew chief “do you still use a chain. The crew chief replied “sure whenever we get the truck stuck”.

Which makes me ask just how wide is a point?

Why Does a Bug Turn?

Did you ever think about the path of a bug? Why it alters its path? It crawls along its straight path then, suddenly without reason or provocation alters its course. Is it perhaps that he has traveled outside his environment?  Entomologists will tell you that when the bug grows weak they find it harder to exert energy to the path. When they are too weak they are stuck and frequently die shortly afterwards so they alter a course to return to familiar avenues of nourishment, not unlike the surveyors attitude with understanding how new technology can enhance their services. We all have our comfort zone that keeps us bound with limitations.  The educator has tenure, the union member has solidarity and the surveyor has the training to retrace others footsteps by analysis of evidence.

It is this guided path by the surveyor that makes us turn like the bug when faced with new technology. We saw it with the introduction of the total station and again with the advancements of GPS. Surveying is supposed to be the retracement of another surveyors work not a technology or math competition where a tenth of a foot is challenged. New technology is the focus going toward the challenge of whose math is better instead of embracing it by outing the principals and the art of surveying into play.

When I first started surveying we would evaluate found evidence right there in the field.  We would make a decision as to which set of found monuments we would use to best trace the previous surveyors path. With  GPS and Total Stations today’s surveyors can collect  coordinate values and suddenly you are in a virtual world. Now you are not boots on the ground evaluating the evidence right there right now but in a virtual world back at the office or in the truck which also enables multiple eyes to evaluate the field at the desktop. Terrestrial Mobile LiDAR Scanning (TMLS) is doing this to the topographic data collection routines in much the same way. It is taking the evaluation of the terrain shapes and break lines out of the field and into the office  and into a virtual environment. 

So, like a bug as we alter our course let’s not do it because we have become weak, lets embrace it to forge ahead new paths that make us stronger. When the bug eventually rolls over is it to die?