Page 6 - WM Donald Newsletter - Edition Six

THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION IN CIVIL E
For more than 30 years W M Donald has continuously invested in cutting edge surveying and setting out equipment. Working closely with our equipment suppliers, W M Donald often gets to see and trial the latest innovations before they come to market.
Trimble Inc is based in Sunnyvale, California. Founded in 1978, the company is a world leader. In its own words, it provides systems that enable users to collect, manage and analyse complex information faster and easier.
Here are three Trimble products - one in current use, one just arrived, one for the future - which W M Donald is involved with.
Total stations – systems that use digital technology to capture land survey data – were first developed in the 1970s; W M Donald has been using one-man total stations for 36 years. The Trimble SX10 Scanning Total Station, the latest addition to the fleet, has been out on site for seven months. Mike Meldrum is W M Donald’s Engineering Manager and is responsible for ensuring the potential of Trimble technology is translated into site efficiencies, project accuracy and added value for the client:
‘The SX10 combines a Total Station, high-density 3-D scanner and image capture device in one unit. We’ve already captured some great data with it. It’s incredibly versatile. You can do everything from traditional setting out and surveying through to highly
detailed scanning work using the same unit and utilising the same workflow process.’
Whilst the SX10 is already in the field, the new TSC7 logger has just arrived. W M Donald received the first one in Scotland and one of the first in the UK.
“It’s like having a full-function Windows 10 laptop in the palm of your hand. The bigger 7” screen means our site engineers can use split screen and 3-D views. It will increase the amount of data site teams can handle and make it easier and faster for more complex designs to be shared with site.’ Coupled with Access 18 which is the latest field software it will give our site engineers greater
efficiency on site.”
SX10 in use on site
Augmented (Mixed) Reality (AR) is where digital images and data are projected on to, and integrated with, the real-world view; for a very simple recent example of AR, think Pokemon Go. It is set to revolutionise construction over the next decade with, for example, data being projected directly to site workers via a screen attached to a hard hat or through AR glasses. Microsoft Hololens technology is an example of the latter.
Trimble SiteVision (mixedreality. trimble.com) is a handheld mixed reality device that automatically takes 3-D designs and projects them onto your site. It can be used to show buried utilities, bring cut and fill maps to life, and show the visual impact of structural and architectural designs in the landscape.
‘I only got to evaluate a beta model for a few hours hour recently, but the results were amazing.
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SiteVision mixed reality screen capture
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