LiDAR mobile mapping for the Oil and Gas industry

Our client needed to understand the route taken by the Buzzard Phase II towhead to the town ensuring its safe movement.

The towhead was 35m long, 6m high and 350 tonnes, and the only way to organise a trial run of the route was to capture the whole route and the towhead using LiDAR imaging, and then create digital twins to be used in a virtual reality suite to allow the client to assess potential obstacles along the route and on to the site.

The survey was carried out in two distinct parts:

• Mobile scanning was carried out using our bespoke mobile mapping system measuring one million points per second camera to colourise the scan points. Due to the weather conditions – bright sun interspersed with heavy showers – the mobile data was carried out three times and the best images used to colourise the scan data. The mobile scans were quickly processed prior to leaving site to ensure enough data was captured and that no spikes or errors developed during the scan process.
• A static laser scanner measuring 2 million points per second with built-in camera was used for static scans. The static scans were carried out at each significant turn ensuring that full detail of the corners was captured leaving no shadows from parked cars or pedestrians. The detailed point cloud from the static scanner captured all obscured objects and services that could cause an obstruction along the route such as telephone exchange boxes, walls and lamp posts. The static scans were timed between the rain showers and when the sunlight was strong giving clear colour definition to the scan data.

We delivered a final clean point cloud in .pts format for modelling and converting into the VR suite. The final point cloud was further processed to produce an AutoCAD drawing with 3D contours and levels to OS datum along the route.