In a feasibility study for residential development, surveying vendor MP Design Group is using lidar-equipped drones to create topographic 3D maps of an abandoned golf course.
The golf course in Biloxi, Mississippi, is filled with overgrown fairways and greens and trees that are unkept. Using lidar allowed MP Design Group to penetrate tree canopies and wooded areas to collect more data and provide a better design surface for engineers.
“The big difference between the lidar technology and conventional surveying is the time and manpower,” said David Machado, owner of MP Design Group. “It’s just totally changed the approach we’ve used in competing on surveying. It’s also changed the timeframe significantly reducing the turnaround times that we can give to our clients and provide them with the critical data that they are looking for.”
The company used Microdrones' unmanned aerial drones to survey the golf course using lidar to transform raw data into the files needed to create a 3D point cloud of the ground surface. The lidar was able to provide nearly 62 million points in a 22-minute flight, which is more than enough to create a topographic survey.
