Spending is increasing and lasers are among tools being added.

For the past two years, Svein Ivar Vestbø, a survey engineer with Norway’s Geomatikk Survey, has been scanning and producing 3D point clouds of relatively small structures. That all changed in December 2018 with a restoration project that would scale their scanning and surveying expertise to never-before heights and depths.

In sharing some tragic instrument memories, I hope to encourage those people who use surveying instruments on a daily basis along with the occasional user.

Categories studied include total stations, data collector/controllers, geodetic survey-grade carrier-phase GPS receivers, mapping-grade code-phase receivers, 3D laser scanners, UAVs, and wireless cloud computing.

Land-use consultancy Dresdner Robin provided expert services on the future home of Jersey City’s first Whole Foods Market.

On most major urban projects, long before the first bucket of dirt has been scooped, the first pile driven, even the first property corner verified, work, in the form of pre-construction survey and monitoring, has already been set in place.

How complicated can it be to redesign a simple bus stop?

If the Charlotte Douglas International Airport (CLT) offered frequent-contractor points, the professional land surveyors at CES Group Engineers would likely be triple-platinum members.

On many jobsites throughout the world, layout for a structure’s mechanicals is still done using a measuring tape, a string, and a lumber crayon. Not so for HPS Mechanical, which is well into its fourth year embracing layout technology based on a robotic total station.