Zebedee arrives

While we were away in Ghana, our new "toy" arrived, the ZEB-REVO hand-held TLS instrument (or Zebedee). I say "toy" because it's not - it's a highly-portable laser scanner, developed by CSIRO in Australia, with much lower power and range than our Riegl but with correspondingly much lower weight, hence the much greater portability. It's designed to be used on mobile platforms - cars, UAVs and the like; the platform in this case being our legs. The idea is that we can use it to augment the Riegl, combining both to provide additional information in environments where we may find it hard to move the Riegl around and/or where the understory causes a lot of occlusion. First tests show it's *very* easy to use, which is a key point. Also, so far I'm impressed with the SLAM software that automatically co-registers all the data into a single point cloud. It seems to work well as long as you capture enough objects & targets that the software can identify in post-processing. I'm really looking forward to getting it out into a real forest environment with the Riegl to start experimenting.

The Ginkgo trees in the UCL quad, done in around 1 minute, with ghost Lewis's everywhere.

A rather more careful and complete scan done by Phil of you know where.

An animation of a walking down Gower Street, done by Kim. And below, a quick look inside the Dept. from a walk out of the lab and down the stairs.

And finally .... Ewan's nice picture of two great minds at work. Look, how hard can it be, just switch it off and on again.