Autonomous reality capture: from 3D data acquisition to digital twin creation

With the recent release of Hexagon Geosystem’s BLK ARC and BLK2FLY technologies, the focus of creating automated large-scale 3D geospatial digital twins evolves from that of efficient primary data acquisition entirely to endgame interpretation and creation of the Building Information Model (BIM). The devices autonomously map areas of interest in 3D point clouds with potential to create accurate digital twins. The BLK ARC is compatible with the Boston Dynamics Spot robot and comes equipped with panoramic cameras, a high-resolution camera, and a dual-axis lidar to map its surroundings. The BLK2FLY is an autonomous flying laser scanner used to explore hard-to-reach areas and map entire buildings. This PhD will investigate the application of timely and novel deep learning approaches, addressing issues of complex feature segmentation and classification of the automatically generated point cloud datasets derived from the newly released BLK tech.

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