How ETM Survey is reshaping construction projects with LIDAR

How ETM Survey is reshaping construction projects with LIDAR (Courtesy of the Jacksonville Business Journal) — Long before shovels hit dirt on a new building or construction gets its legs, planning must first begin with a survey — the process of creating a geospatial measurement of land.

It’s a pivotal building block for any development project, said Shawn Barnett, executive vice president of survey and geospatial technologies at ETM Survey.

“The thing about survey is that it’s one of those disciplines nobody knows about until it’s wrong,” he said. “It’s a foundational component of everything that is built. Nothing else happens until the survey is done.”

Founded in 1924, ETM Survey is an affiliate of Jacksonville-based England-Thims & Miller Inc.

Technological advancements have enabled ETM Survey to chart various projects through the years, most recently surveying the Jacksonville Jaguars’s Stadium of the Future. A century ago, ETM Survey used chains to map out a landscape. Today, it uses LIDAR.

Accurate to the millimeter, LIDAR also supplies engineers with more measurement data to make three dimensional calculations and develop a to-scale, real-world virtual environment.

“Basically LIDAR is a laser that goes out and when that laser hits a point, it creates a measurement,” said Barnett. “Imagine doing that in a 360 degree radius and being able to capture hundreds of measurements per square foot. It allows for a 3D rather than a 2D image data capture.”

There are four ways ETM Survey uses this technology: terrestrial, mobile, aerial and wearable, the latter three of which were used to map out the Jaguars’ stadium.

Terrestrial LIDAR is a traditional surveying method, Barnett said, which mounts to a tripod. Mobile is typically used for roadway environments. LIDAR is put on a vehicle and captures imagery to the left and right as it drives.

The third method hangs a LIDAR system from a UAV platform to capture data below, penetrating through vegetation. The last method used by ETM Survey is called wearable LIDAR. A surveyor wears a NaVis Mobile Lidar system and Building Information Modeling backpack, walks through an environment and captures spatial data.

“All of our platforms are not only capturing data points, they’re also capturing imagery,” said Barnett. “So photographic, high density photographs in the system are capturing both of those things simultaneously: the photograph, and then the 3D image. Then it uses the photograph to colorize the point cloud.”

It’s this technology that’s helped develop well-known projects like the Stadium of the Future and the St. Johns Town Center, master-planned communities like Nocatee and SilverLeaf, and other infrastructure projects, to name a few.

LIDAR technology in particular is something relatively new to the industry, which also means there’s a smaller pool of potential employees to do the work.

“To be able to provide a three-dimensional survey is new,” Barnett said. “It’s new in our industry. It’s not fully embraced by the survey community at this point, just because the entry is steep. The investment dollars are steep, the people you have to train, so there’s a ramp up. You have to be specialized at doing this to be able to provide the data.”

Photo courtesy of England-Thims & Miller Inc.