30-Acre Residential and Commercial Property Scan

For the Powell, Ohio project we leveraged the use of aerial lidar in combination with terrestrial laser scanning to quickly document a large historic portion of the city. This data was then used to generate revit models of all the buildings, and included a model of the topography.

What We Did

For our Powell, OH project, we created detailed models of every residence, business, parking lot, public park, street, and sidewalk in the downtown core. To cover over 30 acres of residential and commercial properties comprehensively, we supplemented our terrestrial data collection with an Aerial LiDAR unit.

See images and read more about the project here.

Challenges

Some of the challenges faced with such a large undertaking were:

• Coordinating roof access for dozens of commercial buildings posed a significant challenge.
• Residential roofs required all data to be captured from ground level only.
• Capturing large, open spaces—like parking lots and public parks—as well as the heavily wooded areas surrounding downtown, added complexity.
• To ensuring efficient and comprehensive coverage of the 30-acre area, we opted to use Aerial LiDAR as the primary data collection method.

Benefits

Some of the benefits of coupling drone surveying with aerial LiDAR include:

• Unparalleled accuracy in capturing topographical data, even in dense forests. It can penetrate tree canopies and underbrush to gather comprehensive topographical data, which is challenging with traditional methods alone.
• The drone eliminates the need for our team to break down and set up equipment repeatedly on roofs or take numerous extra scans from multiple angles for each residential roof. Instead, the drone captured the entire area in less than an hour, saving significant time.
• Aerial LiDAR is highly efficient for data collection: Traditional ground-based surveys can be time-consuming and labor-intensive, often requiring teams to spend weeks or even months in the field. In contrast, Aerial LiDAR covers large areas in a fraction of the time, delivering comprehensive data sets in just a few flights.