This airborne LiDAR is an efficient tool for highway expansion projects

I. Project Background

The highway is one of the busiest traffic corridors in the country and there is an urgent need to upgrade and expand the old road in order to relief the traffic pressure caused by the increasing scale of traffic.

II. Survey Area Overview and Requirement

The project is located in southern China and the terrain elevation difference is within 50m, which is plain terrain. The whole survey area is a strip of approximately 10km in length and 100m in width. The entire survey area is dominated by highway.

The project as a whole should be carried out in accordance with the accuracy requirements of the 1:500 topographic map. The elevation accuracy of the road surface point cloud should be within 2cm and the plane accuracy should be within 5cm.

III. Solution

ARS1000L airborne laser measurement system which is mounted on an UAV is adopted in this survey project.

System advantages:

1. Lightweight: full carbon fibre airframe, light in weight

2. Long range: maximum range of LiDAR up to 1350m

3. Long endurance:operation time of the UAV with payload could reach 50mins

4. Strong wind resistance:excellent wind resistance and stability

IV. Technical Route

The project is generally implemented according to the technical route of field survey,flight route planning, base station erection,field data collecting, data processing, quality check and result submission.

According to the requirements of the project, a total of 35 target points, 18 check points and 4 route planning sorties were laid out along the route.

V. Achievement

Part of the highway surface points after classification

Orthophoto

Colored point cloud results

Accuracy Verification

IV. Project Summary

In this highway reconstruction and expansion project, through the verification of the elevation accuracy, the accuracy between air strips and the plane accuracy of the point cloud, the mean square error of elevation is 1.7cm and the mean square error of plane is 1.5cm, which meets the requirement of the 1:500 topographic map.

It could obtain the 3D spatial information of the ground accurately and quickly and obtain the high-resolution optical images at the same time by using ARS-1000L airborne laser measurement system, so as to extract the terrain information completely, which is an excellent solution for the production of topographic map and cross-sections for road design.