Hello, and welcome to this Infrastructure-themed GeoSpatial Stream. I’m your host, Todd Danielson, and today’s Lead Sponsor is Autodesk.
Today’s Top Story is drones and their increasing use in infrastructure applications. Whether called an unmanned aircraft system, UAS, or unmanned aerial vehicle, UAV, or drone, they’re the little flying planes or helicopters that used to be toys, but now are changing the face of many industries.
Let’s start with this article in the March/April 2016 issue of Informed Infrastructure, which describes how engineering and surveying companies are increasingly using these systems and the wide variety of sensors that can be placed on them.
The article covers two case studies. The first illustrates how a drone from Trimble enabled a land developer in Arizona to turn an abandoned golf course into a collection of small farm-to-work co-ops. If successful, this project could change how land can be rapidly redeveloped for entirely new uses.
The other case study describes how Italy is using an Aibot drone to monitor and inspect its bridges in a safe and rapid manner. It allows a much smaller crew to perform the work with minimal disruptions to traffic, saving time and money.
Check out the full article with many more details, and look to Informed Infrastructure to keep you up to date on other new trends and technologies changing the industry.
That was today’s Top Story. I’ll be back with more news after this interview clip of Leica Geosystems’ Stuart Woods at Autodesk’s REAL 2016 event.
The American Road & Transportation Builders Association developed this interactive map featuring the latest state news and information on transportation funding issues. It seems simple at first, but when you click on a state, a wide variety of useful information can be accessed.
Here’s a headline that I just had to pass along: chemists have developed transparent wood. Seriously. An article in the American Chemical Society describes how researchers removed the part of plants that block light. The wood isn’t crystal clear, but it’s twice as strong as Plexiglass, and could help boost the efficiency of solar cells, among other possible uses.
In industry headlines, CINTEC International developed a new type of dissipative wall anchor to help protect heritage buildings in some of the most earthquake-prone parts of the world.
Trimble introduced its FieldPoint RTX correction service for geospatial positioning applications, providing horizontal accuracy up to 10 centimeters without use of a base station or local VRS network.
For the second consecutive year, IMAGINiT won the 2016 Autodesk Platinum Club Award at the Autodesk One Team Conference by achieving largest revenue growth of any Autodesk partner in North America.
SmarterBetterCities introduced support in its CloudCities for Google Earth and SketchUp, allowing organizations to effectively create and publish 3D models across multiple platforms, including the Web.
And Siteco released Rail-SIT railway inspection and analysis software that’s compatible with mobile-mapping systems from Optech, Riegl, Topcon and Leica, among others.
For today’s Final Thought, here’s a clip from an episode of the Construction Climate Talks series featuring European Commission Policy Adviser Josefina Lindblom.
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I’m Todd Danielson, and this … was your GeoSpatial Stream.
