Siteco launches Sky-Scanner payload

2nd June 2016 - 11:30 GMT | by The Shephard News Team

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Siteco has announced the launch of a new Sky-Scanner LiDAR and imagery data collection system for UAVs that has been in development since 2015.

The Sky-Scanner's development project was undertaken in collaboration with Japanese surveying and inspection engineering firm ASCO-DAITO and Italian survey company LTS.

The airborne data collection system aims to fill the gap between expensive and complex LiDAR systems and low-cost, low-altitude photogrammetry systems.

Sky-Scanner consists of a Velodyne VLP16 scanner, 16-20 Mpx high resolution camera for imagery and an Applanix AP15 inertial navigation system. The company has verified accuracies of ±5 cm on regular surfaces (roads, walls), and ±8 cm on natural ground with vegetation. The double return laser-scanner allows vegetation filtering.

The compact 3.5kg system (including batteries) has a five hour operating window.

The system has been designed to be UAS platform and mission planning software agnostic. The post-processing software generates geo-referenced LAS files which can be imported with any point-cloud management software.

According to the company the system has met performance expectations on the DJI Matrice-600 and DJI-S1000 UAVs.

Augusto Burchi, CEO, Siteco, said: 'We have seen many companies offering lidar and imaging solutions, but none have been able to deliver the data quality at a price required by our partners. The Sky-Scanner is the first such light, compact and cost effective system deployable on a wide variety of commercially available UAVs.'