Between the Poles

Documenting construction projects with a consumer 360° camera

Many see handheld scanners as revolutionizing the construction sector.  Portable and handheld laser scanners offer millimeter accuracy and can be used for engineering purposes.  Cameras with less precision are being used for rapidly documenting a construction site for a variety of purposes.   Most recently a couple of startups Cupix and HoloBuilder are lowering the bar by offering cloud software for the AEC industry to enable images of a construction site to be captured with a consumer grade 360° camera like the Ricoh Theta S or V. Walking through a construction site capturing 360° images along the way and uploading the images to the web is all that is required to create 3D walk-throughs of a site.  The 3D walk-through can be used to measure dimensions, it can be annotated, it can be compared with a BIM model, and 3D images captured at different times can be compared to monitor construction progress.

 

For engineering purposes, handheld laser scanners provide the requisite precision but are relatively expensive.  The scanning process requires time and produces large point cloud files and imagery that need to be managed and processed for visualization.

• The Leica Geosystems BLK360 weighs a mere 2.2 lbs (1 kg), is incredibly small 6.5 x 4 inches and lists for US$16,000.  It is a full laser scanner and imager, capturing 360,000 points/second with a range of 0.6 - 60 meters.  The scanner can be attached to a Microsoft Surface Pro tablet to visualize what you have scanned. Up to 16 of these can be used at the same time.
• Dot Product DPI-8 and DPI-8X (short range) are multi-sensor devices (IR laser and photo cameras).  Targeted at professionals, especially in the engineering and construction sector, the devices incorporate SLAM technology and works with Android handhelds.  All the processing is done locally on the handheld - no cloud processing is required.
• The Faro Freestyle can scan objects within a range of half a meter to 3 meters away with a resolution of  better than 1.5mm with a image point density of up to 45,000 points/m² at 0.5m and up to 10,500 points/m² at 1m.  The scanner is attached to a Microsoft Surface Pro tablet for visualizing the point cloud as you scan.

For rapid site documentation, Matterport allows you to scan a floor of a building in an hour or less, upload the captured data to the cloud (Amazon Web Services) and a couple of hours later have a fully-rendered 3D walk-through that can be accessed over the web.  It was originally targeted on the real estate sector but recently has been showing up at construction industry and other events including the recent BIMForum in Las Vegas.  It provides a dollhouse view to see a whole floor at once, an inside view for walk-throughs, and a floor plan view for a traditional top-down perspective. It relies on IR and photo cameras and multiple scans in each room - scanning every 1.5 to 2.5 meters.  It is capable of rough measurement, but not for engineering or construction purposes.  Its biggest advantages are the speed with which you can scan a site and the small size of the resulting file which has to be uploaded to Matterport's cloud site.  In addition to real estate and construction site documentation, it is used by FM professionals who need a 3D context for facilities management.  For example, it can provide a mechanical room walk through with tags on different pieces of equipment and a way of directing anyone to any location in the facility.  The camera is several thousand dollars and cloud processing requires a subscription.

 

The most recent additions to the technologies that can be used to document a construction site are Cupix and Holobuilder which lower the bar by only requiring a consumer grade 360° camera such as a Ricoh Theta.  In the case of Cupix cloud processing requires a subscription.  Similarly to the Matterport, you walk through the site capturing images with 360° camera as you go.  The resulting images are uploaded to the Cupix site and the result is 3d tours or walk-throughs accessible over the web.  You can compare 3D tours taken on different days to monitor construction progress, compare a 3D walk-through with a BIM model (Revit or IFC) you have uploaded, and measure dimensions with a precision of 1% or better at 20 meters.  To reach this level of precision in measurement requires including a marker when taking pictures.  Alternatively if a dimension is known it can be used to scale the entire walk-through.  Cupix can use images captured indoors and outdoors.  Cupix says that if GPS metadata is available from the photos, they can georeference the walk-throughs and generate a KML file. I used Cupix with a low cost 360Fly4K camera and a Samsung Note 5 phone to capture the interior and a bit outside of a cabin in a nearby park.  It took a couple of attempts to get the correct spacing between camera placements in capturing 360° images, but after that it was straightforward. I uploaded a rough picture of a floor plan and I was able to walk-through the resulting 3D tour using the Cupix web viewer.  Without doing anything additional I was able to get rough measurements accurate to about 5%.  Cupix only requires a consumer grade 360° camera.  A subscription is necessary for cloud processing. Cupix is targeting a broad market including travel and hospitality, real estate, and arts and culture in addition to the AEC industry

 

I just came across HoloBuilder at the recent BIMForum in Las Vegas.  Like Cupix it only requires a consumer 360° camera. At first glance it appears to be focused on the AEC industry and makes creating and managing 3D tours of construction sites very easy.  It offers 360° SiteStream which is a unique live streaming solution for real-time construction progress monitoring in 3D that runs as a plug-in app on the Ricoh Theta V.

Open source-based mobile viewer creates value for electric power utilities with multiple GISs

One of the challenges faced by large utilities with multiple GIS, outage management, customer information and other systems, which are often the result of mergers, is how to make spatial and associated data, in different, often incompatible systems, accessible to all users not just GIS professionals.  At Distributech 2018 Duke Energy described an off-the-shelf web-based product based on open source components that is being used by 8000 users, 2000 of them using it 24/7 every day, to access GIS and associated data in several GIS systems, both online and offline, using laptops, tablets and phones.  An important advantage of the the selection process Duke used in selecting the product was that it made it possible for a relative newcomer to compete successfully with the traditional GIS incumbents.

Background

Large investor-owned utilities are often the result of mergers. For example, in 2012 Duke Energy and Progress Energy merged to create the largest U.S. utility with 7.4 million U.S. customers and approximately 52,700 megawatts of electric generating capacity. The challenge for the IT folks is how to manage the many disparate IT systems that such mergers bring together. Historically Duke Energy and Progress Energy have employed all the major GIS systems including Synercom, Intergraph FRAMME, GE Smallworld, ESRI, Intergraph GTechnology, and IBM GFIS. Accessing the valuable operational data in multiple systems is a challenge because each system has its own user interface and command structure. Over the years I have seen a number of solutions that have attempted to address the challenge of providing a common viewer for visualizing data from multiple data sources. But each has had limitations, for example, all data had to be synced to a central Oracle database, or it could only run online making it difficult to deploy to the field, or it had limited support for the many GISs and user files used by utilities, or it supported iOS on handheld devices but not Android, or did not support open standards such as OGC WMS and WFS, or did not support Google Maps, or was so complex users required extensive training and it was like pulling teeth to geth them to use iit.

At Distributech 2018 Ron York, Lead Consultant/ GIS, and Francisco Sarmento, Lead Consultant, both at Duke Energy described how Duke has resolved the problem of a common viewer for several different GIS systems which was brought to a head by the merger of Duke and Progress. They also described the somewhat unusual process by which Duke selected the vendor whose product provided the successful solution.

Open source geospatial components

A key differentiator of the product Duke chose is that it is leverages open source components; PostGIS, GeoServer and Leaflet being the main ones. The product builds on the collective wisdom, code and support provided by the worldwide open source geospatial community.  Leaflet is the leading open-source JavaScript library for mobile-friendly interactive maps. PostGIS adds spatial capabilities to the PostgreSQL relational database. It extends PostgreSQL so it can store, query, and manipulate spatial data. GeoServer is a web server that allows maps and data in a variety of formats to be served to standard clients such as web browsers and desktop GIS programs. Data is published via Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standard interfaces, such as WMS and WFS.  These are all Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGEO) projects.

Multiple GIS support

The product Duke selected supports ESRI ArcGIS, GE Smallworld, Intergraph GTechnology, spatialNET and Google Maps. At Duke it is used to access data in a couple of GISs as well as non-GIS data in Maximo, SAP, three different outage management systems, four or five customer information systems, and can link to CAD drawings and photos and images.  Importantly for engineering users it preserves the original symbology and background maps of the different GIS systems.

Online and offline

Another key advantage of Duke's solution is that it can run equally well offline and online and is able to seamlessly combine and switch between online and offline data.

Mobile and office devices

It supports mobile as well as office devices, running on laptops, tablets and phones running iOS, Android, and Windows. The user interface adapts automatically for each device, displaying map layers, forms and other data in a way that is appropriate for each device.

Synced or direct access to databases

It provides two ways of accessing data; one is to periodically import or sync data into the system's spatial database, which uses PostGIS, and the other is to directly access the data via a web service. It supports ESRI REST Services, which are used by ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Enterprise, and the industry standard OGC WMS and WFS web services, which are supported by all major geospatial vendors.

It does not support direct edit of spatial data, but does allow a GIS data correction requests to be routed through Maximo following Duke standard business procedure for making corrections.

It is flexible enough to support different business processes for collecting and organizing data. For example, pole inspections are conducted by circuit in what was Progress service territories and by square area in what was Duke's service territory.

Simplicity of use

Another of the key differentiators of Duke's web-based solution is that it is not targeted on GIS professionals, but on the 95% of people within Duke who can get a lot of value from a really simple Google Maps style interface onto their enterprise data.

Leading up to and during deployment Duke put on road shows, made web demos available online, utilized computer-based-training, and provided job-aid documents to make people aware of the new system.  The tool caught on surprisingly rapidly. Within five months of it being deployed there were 5000 users. Currently there are 8000 users with over 2000 users accessing it 24/7 every day.

Anticipated and unanticipated benefits

The major expected benefit that was realized by the system is that eases the integration of Duke and Progess. All GIS asset data is exposed through a single tool to designers and asset engineers. But there were some unanticipated benefits as well.  It has had a direct impact on tax calculation - it shortened the cycle for internal auditors to complete tax assessments.  It is also widely used during storms and other natural disasters. It enables crews from different area to use a familiar tool to analyze unfamiliar data in areas where they haven't been before.  It is used to provide driving directions for field crews.  Storm managers overlay outages, assets, flood plains, wind, rain, traffic  and other maps for situational assessment.  It allows manager to share staging sites during storms. It has also  proved extremely useful in locating "unmatched outages" - outages called in by first responders with just an address.

Process for choosing a vendor levels playing field for new entrants

Duke used an interesting process to select the vendor. Preliminary vendor interviews were conducted to exclude vendors that clearly didn't have a solution that could meet Duke's needs. Remote web demos provided a cheap and easy way to narrow down the list of vendors. A request for proposal (RFP) process was used to solicit technical-only proposals from product vendors. (Duke was only interested in off-the-shelf products not bespoke solutions.)  Duke picked the top five and asked them to come to Duke for a scripted demonstration. Instead of asking the vendors for a benchmark demonstrating how their product would address Duke's requirements using Duke data, they asked the vendors to demonstrate their product using their own data. They picked the top two vendors and began contract negotiations to decide on one vendor which turned out to be Ubisense MyWorld, a relatively new entrant in the geospatial world.  An important advantage of the selection process Duke used is that it made it possible for a relative newcomer to compete successfully with traditional GIS incumbents.

Handheld 3D scanners rapidly approaching consumer pricing

I have just spent an incredible three days in Houston at the SPAR3D 2017 conference.  There is so much going on right now in the 3D world with several key technologies just coming to fruition and finding broad application in the real world. 

 

Many see handheld scanners as potentially revolutionizing the construction sector.  Handheld scanners had a high profile at SPAR3D this year, with several vendors showing new products and many promising future products in the $400 price range.  One vendor is already selling a 3D imaging product that attaches to an iPad and sells for $400.

 

First exhibited at the 2013 SPAR3D, Dot Product has released a products DPI-8 and DPI-8X (short range) similar in its basic technology, multisensor (IR and photo cameras) to their first handheld.  I saw it first at the SPAR3D 2014 conference. Targetted at professionals, especially in the engineering and construction sector, their latest product incorporates SLAM and works with Android handhelds and tablets.  All the processing is done locally on the handheld - no cloud processing is required.  The captured point clouds are small - you can even cull the point clouds on the fly. The working range of the DPI-8 is from 0.6 m to 3.7 m. It export in PTS, PTX, PLY, and PTG. Binary files integrate directly with AVEVA LFM, Autodesk ReCap, Trimble RealWorks, CloudCompare,  ClearEdge3D, Veesus Arena4D, and PanoMap. The DPI-8X lists for US$ 5150.  Dot Product has been working with Google on Project Tango and says there is a $450 scanner in the future.

Mantis Vision has also offered a handheld scanner F5 for professionals for several years.  Their latest offering is the Mantis Vision F5-SR scanner/imager. It has a range from 0.5 meters (m) up to 4.5 m with an accuracy of a few millimeters (mm).  It also relies on IR and photo cameras.  It uses triangulation to locate objects and is in lower end of the the F5 price range of $20-50,000.  Mantis Vision promises to make its technology available for everyone - being able to scan an object, share the 3D model online, and send it to a 3D printer—from a smartphone.  At the end of May Mantis Vision will be releasing a new scanner, the F6 at a price of $15,000.  The F6 can perform dynamic as well as static scanning and it is possible to scan collaboratively with up to 16 of the devices.

 

A handheld scanner that garnered a lot of attention at SPAR3D was the Matterport Pro from Matterport Immersive Media Systems.    Originally targetted on the real estate industry, the Matterport Pro allows you to scan a house in an hour or less, upload the captured data to the cloud (Amazon Web Services) and a couple of hours later you will have a fully-rendered model that can be used for walkthroughs with potential buyers.  It provides a dollhouse view to see a whole property at once, an inside view for walkthroughs, and a floorplan view for a traditional top-down perspective. It relies on IR and photo cameras.  It is pretty well restricted to indoor scans and requires multiple scans for a room - scanning every 1.5 to 2.5 meters.  It is claimed to be 95.5 % accurate - it can be used for measurement for sales not for engineering or construction purposes.  Its biggest advantages are the speed with which you can scan a house, for example, and the small size of the resulting file.  It can also provide a 3D context for facilities management.  For example, it can provide a mechanical room walk through with tags on different pieces of equipment and a way of directing anyone to any location in the facility.   The Matterport Pro 3D Camera lists for US$ 3600.00 plus US$ 49/mo to US$ 149/mo for cloud processing.

 

I have already blogged about the Leica Geosystems BLK360 which includes Autodesk Recap Pro.  It is a bit of a stretch to call it a handheld scanner but it weighs only 2.2 lbs (1 kg) and is incredibly small 6.5 inches (in) by 4 in.  Unlike the other devices described here it is a full laser scanner and imager. It captures 360,000 points/second with a range of 0.6 - 60 meters.  It has one button and can capture a full 360 degree scan in less than 3 minutes.  All aspects of the operation of the scanner can be controlled remotely from an iPad Pro.  It can perform all the processing required for visualization in the field on an iPad Pro.  It lists for US$16,000 and includes a one year license for Recap Pro. 

 

I blogged about the Faro Freestyle previously.  It can scan objects within a range of half a meter to 3 meters away with a resolution of  better than 1.5mm with a image point density of up to 45,000 points/m² at 0.5m and up to 10,500 points/m² at 1m.  The scanner is attached to a Microsoft Surface Pro tablet for visualizing the point cloud as you scan.  It sells for $11,000 to $12,000.  It is targetted on the architecture, accident reconstruction, civil engineering, construction, facility management, and industrial manufacturing sectors.

 

The least expensive scanner shown at SPAR3D was the Structure sensor with Canvas software from Occipital.  A new screw-on lens increases the field of view to 120º so that it requires fewer scans to capture a room.  Its range is 0.3 - 5 meters with a precision of 0.17%. It is targetted on the home owner as well as interior designers, architects, and contractors.  It can be used to capture 3D models of interiors, share them, measure with them or convert them to formats supported by AutoCAD and Sketchup.  The vendor offers a Scan To CAD service, that converts scans into editable CAD files (.skp, .dwg and .dae) for use with  tools like SketchUp, AutoCAD, and Revit.  It retails for $379 - $499 and attaches to several models of iPad including the iPad mini 4.  At the end of April it will be possible to purchase Bridge, a headset that makes it possible to mix real world and virtual realities with an iPhone.

On-site AR visualization of BIM designs in an urban environment

There are two advances in technology that are having almost as much impact on mapping our world and tracking the location of things in it as the introduction of the GPS.  The development of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) in the 1980s and 1990s has made possible the mass production of micro inertial measurement units (IMU) comprised of a combination of accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometers.   These have enabled the smart phone which contains a range of sensors, typically an accelerometer, thermometer, gyroscope, pressure sensor, humidity sensor, light sensor, location sensor (GPS),and a magnetometer.  The second major advance is fast structure-from-motion (SfM) algorithms.  One of the first applications is simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) technology which was developed for autonomous vehicles. In 2012 GeoSLAM was developed which made it possible to solve a major spatial problem, accurately tracking the location of a person inside a building or in an obstructed environment such as a city.  Recently SfM has been successfully applied to indoor mapping in the form of new professional-level products from Indoor Reality and Leica Geosystems (Pegasus Backpack).

It turns out that structure-from-motion technologies can also be used for on-site visualization of a virtual BIM design in a real urban context.  At this year's Geo Business 2016 I had a chance to talk to Crispin Hoult about an augmented reality product called UrbanPlanAR his company Linknode is developing with SfM technology from Heriot-Watt University that is designed to do this on consumer handheld smart devices such as an iPad.

Background

For years researchers and technologists have been struggling with a major spatial challenge - accurately tracking the location of a person in an obstructed environment such as a city or inside a building in 6 dimensions, 3D location and 3D orientation.  Stucture-from-motion solves this problem and enables you to track your position and your orientation in an obstructed environment where GNSS satellite signals are unavailable or unreliable. Typically input from an inertial measurement unit (IMU) and LiDAR is used to construct in real-time a 3D map of the immediate environment including objects such as walls and other objects.  As you move, the map is reconstructed and this is used to record your trajectory.  The algorithm is robust and helps to addresses some of the problems, such as drift, that results from using just an accelerometer.  

Indoor mapping products, such as those based on GeoSLAM, assume that you are working in an unknown environment.  But what if you already have information about the environment in the form of GIS maps, point clouds, and other georeferenced information ? Tracking your location in a known environment using just a smart handheld device is the problem that Crispin Hoult and his company Linknode are addressing.  The specific business opportunity he is targeting with this technology is on-site (in-field) augmented reality visualization of BIM designs for new buildings with a consumer smart handheld. 

Technically SfM algorithms require multi-sensor input.  The typical smart phone or tablet has many motion tracking MEMS devices built into it.  If you are outside in an unobstructed environment, the GPS sensor can reliably report your location to within 5 or 10 meters.  But when you enter an obstructed environment where you have reliable georeferenced information, you need an algorithm that uses the camera and the inertial navigation sensors in the handheld tablet to accurately track its location and orientation in real-time.  Crispin has been working with Heriot-Watt university to "mobilize" an algorithm that does just this. Basically the algorithm uses “visual-inertial tracking” for the online tracking of the 3D position and 3D orientation of the tablet. This is supported by ‘prior’ learning of the visual and structural appearance of the environment through structure-from-motion (SFM).

Crispin, what is the business problem that UrbanPlanAR addresses ?

We are targeting UrbanPlanAR at on-site visualization using only a consumer smart handheld.  We are making it possible for an architect, owner, or city planner to come to a site with a handheld tablet and in real-time overlay a BIM model showing the design for a new building in the context of the real world.  This is an application of augmented reality.  What you see on the tablet is the real world and into that we superimpose the BIM model.  Our focus right now is to visualize the building design in its urban context - making it possible to walk around in the area and see the building from different viewpoints. We add value by providing more trusted, more contextual visualizations so people can make decisions and engage more with the planning process.

The alternative way of doing this is to create a completely virtual world (often referred to as black box), but then you have problems with resolution and realism.  We have research carried out by the University of Glasgow that shows that by doing on-site visualization and not blackboxing it, it becomes more trustworthy and enables more engagement from stakeholders.

Another way to look at the business value of UrbanPlanAR is that it adds value to your BIM investment. Designers and contractors invest in BIM because it enables automated clash detection, material takeoff, quantity surveying, construction staging and many other applications. One of the important value-adds that hasn't been fully recognized is visualization.  Our technology can be another strong reason for creating a BIM model in the first place.  If you have already developed a BIM model, it adds value to your model. With our software you can take your BIM model, walk out to the proposed site and show all stakeholders - potential customers, city planners, city engineers, and nearby land and building owners what the proposed structure is going to look like on site, in a real world context.

How does this work, what do I need to do to make this augmented reality visualization of a building design ?

The first step is to choose the context.  Unlike the traditional approach where we would choose a location from which we want to view the building design, with UrbanPlanAR we choose an area of interest, which could be a city square, for example.  Then we collect georeferenced information about the area we have chosen. Currently we use imagery captured specifically for that viewpoint site, but this will soon allow other alternatives to be used, such as existing datasets, for example, a city model, LiDAR scan, oblique imagery, or satellite or overflight imagery.

The next step is to get the BIM model of the design from the architect. To do this we plug into BIM 360, which is the Autodesk data store for BIM models. For smaller projects we can take a model published directly from Revit.

At this point we have the context and we have the BIM model. Then we simply take the mobile device out into the field on a tripod or simply held in the hand, and UrbanPlanAR will use the context to work out exactly where it is and enable you to see in real-time your design within the real world – displaying the BIM model not only “onto”, but visually “within” existing reality.

Unlike Virtual Reality systems where there are cost and time limits to the digitization process, what you see in augmented reality is 3D, infinite resolution that all comes for free as the real world.  What we are showing is a combination of real and virtual. As users stand at the site, they see exactly what is there plus the change. That's what adds to the trust - you are on-site, out in the field or the city square, walking around and showing stakeholders what is actually there with the superimposed virtual model. You can also record it so you can replay it back in the office.  That real-world GIS-based augmented reality we call that GIality. Everything is georeferenced, everything is anchored in the real world. That is what links the virtual to the real world.  You need to know where the virtual building is in real-world coordinates.  The technical challenge is that you also need to know  where the observer is and his/her orientation as he or she walks around the site.

Who do you foresee is the end user of UrbanPlanAR ?

I would say that the primary application is early stage project feasibility and development for a new building. It could be used by the architect or by the developer who is funding the architect. It could also be used as a sales tool at this stage.

The second stage is the planning stage. When you are looking at permitting you need the convince the city or town council, who are the custodians of the city. Typically landscape architects are hired to develop and present the environmental statement and impact of the project to the city planner. But we now live in a world where we no longer have to rely on consultants to convey information.  Nowadays the developer may do this him or herself.  The city or town planners may also be users - as validators of what has been presented. UrbanPlanAR broadens the breadth and depth of 3D information available about the project.  It is also interactive in that the architect can make changes to the BIM model and synchronize that to the users.  Another advantage is that the users can go out to the site at any time to inspect some detail of the design that they may have missed.

What we have found useful is to interactively display different surfaces or finishes, different building heights, and different models. Preconstruction changes are very easy to do.  The architect goes away after getting feedback from stakeholders, creates a new or modified BIM model, uploads it the cloud, and then a user synchronizes with the store and takes it out to the site.  By doing this at the feasibility stage, early on in the planning process, communities become more involved and don't see what is being presented as almost a fait accompli. You want them to leave feeling they are actively involved in the design process - then you get more buy-in and there is less likely to be an appeal during the construction stage.  

Does the BIM model have to be a Revit model ?

We integrate with BIM 360 today and we are planning to support Bentley BIM.  In addition Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) is one of our supported file formats.  But this is not yet equivalent to importing files directly from Revit or Bentley BIM, because exported IFC files from some BIM vendors do not support texture.  

What types of hardware does your software run on ?

We support the iPad Pro and we are working on a Microsoft Surface port.

Does UrbanPlanAR require preprocessing in the cloud or on a desktop ?

Neither the BIM model nor the geoferenced context ends up being the operational model we need to do the localization, but both are valid inputs.  All the input data including GIS context and Revit model is preprocessed on a desktop or in the cloud and then synchronized to the handheld.

Crispin, you already have a product that is designed for rural environments but also relies on augmented reality.  Can you tell me about that ?

Yes it is called VentusAR, and it is designed to work in a rural environment.  It has been targeted on visualizing wind farms and solar farms for land owners, communities and planners because these farms are very contentious issues. Before our our product became available, the standard methodology was to take photographs out in the field, go back to the office, process them on the desktop to incorporate the proposed wind or solar farm, send the resulting images to the printer and then show the picttures to the stakeholders. Because of the time and cost it tended to be done late in the planning process, which made it difficult to make changes.

Late last year for the first time we used VentusAR for visualizing transmission towers.  And a few weeks ago we did our first modeling of transmission lines.  As with UrbanPlanAR, VentusAR uses the tablet’s integrated camera, GPS position and 3D gaming capabilities to create an accurate, location-specific, realistic view of transmission tower models in context.  You can investigate different scenarios with different stock models like towers, turbines, and panels. It works well in a rural environment because our georeferenced information about the real world is typically a digital terrain model. In a rural environment, if your GPS is out by 5 meters and you are looking at something a hundred meters away, it doesn't matter that much.  In an urban environment where you need more precision and can't rely on GNSS, you need a more sophisticated approach, which is what we have done together with Heriot-Watt University for UrbanPlanAR.

The project is supported by Innovate UK, the United Kingdom’s innovation agency (Project 102040).

HxGN Live: 3D underground utility mapping, indoor mapping, UAVs and utility solutions

Last week I had the opportunity to present at the annual Hexagon conference HxGN Live in Anaheim. Hexagon is a rapidly growing company with broad technology reach with core strengths in geospatial surveying and laser scanning technology (Leica Geosystems), UAVs,  software GIS systems for network engineering, network operations, and operations and maintenance of utilities (Intergraph),  design and operation of nuclear power plants (Integraph) and enterprise management of large scale construction projects among other technologies and solutions.

Underground utility mapping

Underground utility conflicts and relocations are the number one cause for project delays during road construction. In 2005 Hexagon acquired UK-based Cable Detection.  Since then Leica Geosystems has offered both electromagnetic and ground penetrating radar hardware and software for detecting and mapping underground utilities.  At HxGN Live this year one of the exciting technology highlights was the Pegasus: Stream, which combines a Leica Pegasus: Two mobile mapping device incorporating laser scanners, optical cameras and GNSS receivers and an IDS Stream EM ground penetrating radar (GPR) array.  I first saw this towable combined above and below surface scanner at Geo Business in London.  According to Stuart Woods, Leica Geosystems Vice-President of Mobile Mapping, Hexagon has worked with IDS for years and is in the process of acquiring IDS' GeoRadar division, which developed and manufactures the Stream array among other radar technology.  This advance in technology puts Hexagon in the forefront of underground utility detection and mapping.

Indoor mapping

The other major hardware highlight of this year's HxGN LIve was the Pegasus Backpack.  This is a wearable reality capture platform that collects data indoors, outdoors and underground.  Klaas de Weerd, COO of Prisma Van Steenis, Prisma Groep, reported the experience that his team in mapping structures in the Netherlands.  Among other structures they mapped the Eye Film Institute in Amsterdam inside and out.  Leica mobile, P20 and P40 scanners were used outside, and the Backpack was used inside and on the roof.

Slope instability detection and monitoring

Enrico Boi, of the Georadar Division of IDS, reported on several applications using interferometric radar to detect slope deformation.   Slope failures are complicated and hard to predict, which is the reason radar is important.  For example, the I-70 through the Rockies is subject to rockfalls especially in the Glenwood Canyon in Colorado.  IDS Interferometric Radar (IBIS) equipment was installed across the Canyon to identify the location of slope instabilities which then could then be stabilized to prevent rockfalls.

Laser scanning during construction

Fokke Broersma of Arcadis NL (Arcadis is also melding geospatial and BIM in construction.) reported on how his company, which is committed to using BIM throughout the construction life cycle, uses laser scanning in conjunction with BIM.  One of the projects he described was the New Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam where laser scanning was used for capturing the existing structure prior to construction, then for as-builts after construction. 

In a related software product Hexagon at HxGN announced the release of HxGN Smart Build.  Smart Build is a cloud-based solution for large scale construction projects that integrates BIM models, point clouds, and as-built measurements to monitor construction progress and identify deviations from plan.

Opening electric network data

Adrienne Behan of ESB, an Irish energy company, described how her company manages its 2 million wood poles.  Their GIS provides multiple views into a single network model which feeds into the outage management system.  It also interfaces to other critical business systems.  Any changes to the network are available to business users of the system within 24 hours.  This is remarkable among utilities where backlogs often result in the network model being months even years out of date.

Mobile sensor platform robot

A highlight of President of Hexagon Safety and Infrastructure Steve Cost's keynote was a product of Hexagon SI's partnership with Gamma 2 Robotics.  The robot that came on stage is a mobile sensor platform.  One application of the product is a security patrol robot branded RAMSEE which can patrol autonomously providing real-time data on intruders, motion, heat, fire, smoke, gas and more.

UAVs

There were several UAVs on display at HxGN.  The one I blogged about several years ago, about the time that Hexagon acquired the German company that had developed it, is the Aibotix.  The Aibotix X6 has turned out to be a very stable platform capable of carrying a variety of sensors.  It is used primarily for industrial inspection such as transmission pylons, dams, bridges, and other structures.  It can hover, the camera or other sensor can be held below or above the frame, it can fly a path guided by GPS even in windy conditions and has fully automated takeoff and landing capabilities.

Historical building preservation Palazzo dei Normanni in Palermo

One of the outstanding examples of using scanning technology to record and preserve information about historical buildings was presented by Italian company Technoart.  The Palazzo dei Normanni in Palermo, Sicily is an incredible structure with an intriguing multi-cultural history.  The first building was built by the Arabs who occupied Sicily in the 9th,10th and 11th centuries.  The Normans conquered Sicily in 1072 and made Palermo the capital of their kingdom. The Norman kings built upon the former Arabian palace. In 1132 Roger II, famous for sponsoring one of the earliest maps of the world based on Arab and Greek sources by Muhammad al-Idrisi (نزهة المشتاق في اختراق الآفاق‎‎,Tabula Rogeriana, Book of Roger), added the incredible Cappella Palatina.  The laser and optical scan using a Pegasus One by Technoart resulted in a point cloud with optical imagery that with the aid of gaming software allows users to virtually walk through the palace and the Palatine Chapel and explore the structure including the gorgeous frescos in detail. 

Background

Over the past 16 years, Hexagon has evolved from an auto parts and industrial measurement (metrology) hardware provider in Sweden to an international hardware and software solutions provider with annual revenue of € 3 billion and remarkably an operating margin of 23%.  It operates in the agriculture, geospatial, geosystems, manufacturing intelligence (metrology), mining, positioning intelligence, process power and marine, and safety and infrastructure sectors.  Among the many acquisitions it has acquired in the last decade are widely known Leica Geosystems (was Wild), Intergraph and Erdas.  It has expanded from industrial metrology to include geospatial sensors including Leica total stations and laser scanners; and software-centric enterprise geospatial solutions.  Its industrial enterprise solutions include industrial metrology hardware and software targeting optimizing manufacturing processes.  It has acquired software for designing, constructing and operating industrial plants and offshore facilities.  

GeoBuiz 2016: Geospatial and consumer devices, reality modeling, big data and analytics

Reality modeling

In the future, the deliverables at the end of a construction project will not only include the completed building itself, but also a digital "reality model" of the structure.  The digital model will include digital as-builts comprised of georeferenced point clouds captured by laser-scanning or meshes generated from images captured with a digital camera on a smartphone.  That was the prediction of Bhupinder Singh of Bentley at the GeoBuiz 2016 Summit in Bethesda.  This is a vision that is shared by other professionals in the construction industry including Ron Singh, Chief Surveyor at the Oregon Department of Transportation, who sees it as dramatically changing the construction process from surveying through design and construction to operations and maintenance.

Consumer devices and professionals

Consumer mobile devices will increasingly be the platform for many professional activities which currently require specialized devices and a PC computing platform.  Bryn Fosburgh of Trimble pointed out that while currently the location accuracy of GPS equipped smartphones is 10 meters, centimeter precision is surely coming because all that is required is a relatively simple antenna redesign.  Bryn sees a continuum in these devices between consumer and professional applications.   But while consumers tend to blindly accept whatever is available on their smartphones, professionals using these devices will have to be aware of the limits of the hardware, what it can be used for and what not.  For example, while smartphones in the future will be capable of centimeter accuracy in ideal locations, the accuracy will be less where there is a lot of scatter in the RF signals from the GPS satellites.  To ensure reliable results a professional surveyor relies on multiple sources including GPS linked to an earth station and traditional total station measurements.  Increasingly we will require other professionals to be involved.  Bryn reported a rising demand for photogrammetrists, as a result of the growing volume and availability of high resolution imagery which needs professional to help interpret.

Platform as a service

For virtually all of the world's big IT companies including IBM, Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft and the world's big content companies such as Digital Globe, the cloud is central to their vision of the future.  Together with others in the IT industry Xavier Lopez of Oracle sees the future in platform as a services (PaaS), but there are challenges.  A major challenge is integrating data in different databases including traditional SQL databases from Oracle and Microsoft and nonSQL databases such as Hadoop.  Another challenge is semantics.  Frequently different disciplines use different terms for the same thing.  I have blogged about the CB-NL project in the Netherlands aimed at solving the semantics problem in the construction industry.  Another big issue that Xavier identified is data fusion without co-location - how do you enable efficient processing of a logically federated database when the data resides in different locations ?

Monetizing the cloud

But perhaps the biggest challenge is finding an appropriate business model.  It is not completely transparent how the cloud is going to be successfully monetized, though the trend is toward some form of subscription or pay-per-use.   An interesting model of the successful application of the cloud in the construction industry is Textura, just acquired by Oracle.  Textura’s cloud serves as a place in which all of the participants in a project from the funding, through design, to construction can come together and access the shared assets necessary to complete the project.  Textura’s network includes about 85,000 general and subcontractors who using Textura to collaborate on construction projects.  Textura handles on average about 6,000 projects each month. The company’s shared database, which hosts project budgets, contractors, invoices, payments, change orders and compliance documents, resides in the cloud and is accessible to contract administrators, contractors, developers, subcontractors, consultants, title companies, and banks.

Big data and analytics

One of big drivers for the cloud is enabling the extraction of information from the huge volumes of data (most of which includes location) which are now available.  I have blogged about the nearly 100 petabytes of earth observation imagery available from Digital Globe.  According to Dr Richard W. Spinrad, Chief Scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) , NOAA is expecting to have 160 petabytes of archived geospatial data by 2020. 

As another example, Jeff Jonas of IBM described a publicly available database which includes 600 billion transactions per day collected by telephone companies.  This data, which includes location, can be mined (after being anonymized) for very interesting and commercially valuable information.  Jeff Jonas described some examples - using it to analyze where people spend most of their time (their "pattern of life"), how many people go into a store, and how long they remain in a store. 

Dipanshu Sharma, Founder & CEO, xAd illustrated live some of the things his company, which is in the location-based marketing business, does with this type of data.  xAd can customize ads to target people who are inside a store ("There's a great deal on aisle 5"), just outside one ("Come on in, we have great deals on umbrellas") or close to a competitor's store ("Checkout XXXX, our prices are lower than YYYY") - the words are mine.

In all of these example, geospatial data and technology are key to the applications.  Jeff Jonas foresees that the apps of the future on your smartphone will require geolocation and will be so compelling that just about everyone will enable GPS location on their smartphones.

SPAR 3D: Virtual reality, scan to BIM, infrastructure models, and mapping indoor spaces

I have just experienced two remarkable days at the Spar 3D Expo and Conference in The Woodlands, Texas, in itself a remarkable location near Houston.  I will blog in more detail in the near future about the things and people I had the opportunity to experience over the past two days.

First of all, virtual reality.  Everyone is aware of the Oculus Rift (see the new review at CNET if you aren't).  There are other technologies that have come or are coming from Samsung, Sony and Google.  But at SPAR 3D the most remarkable VR technology I personally experienced was what David Smith, CTO of Wearaility, talked about and allowed me and others to try - a set of incredibly light-weight glasses with acrylic lenses designed to work with a smartphone that gives you a virtual experience comparable to IMAX without the IMAX theatre.  I tried it and found it an absolutely amazing surround experience.  And if you have wondered where Michael Jones, of Keyhole and Google Maps fame, has landed, he is now CEO of Wearality.

Secondly, my personal passion is the geolocation of underground utilities.  At SPAR 3D Mark Klusza, Founder & CTO, Real-time Metrology, Inc. described a major new advance in ground penetrating radar (GPR) technology he has developed that can detect a 3/4 inch rebar (among other things) four feet below the surface in clay.

For existing buildings creating a BIM model remains an art rather than science.  But at SPAR 3D a number of new technologies were presented that can help automate, improve the quality, and speed the process.  Foremost among them in my mind was presented by Nicolas Arnold, VP of Product Development, at SKUR.  With SKUR's technology, which runs in the cloud, you can compare the 3D model that you have developed with the point cloud you derived the model from and identify all the points of significant variance.  The same technology can also be used during a construction project to compare what has been built to what was designed - even when the building is only partially completed.

Ron Singh, Engineering Automation Manager/Chief of Surveys, Oregon Department of Transportation (DoT) described progress on his remarkable vision of how automation is upending how we design, build and monitor, operate and maintain U.S. highway systems.  Richard Arrowsmith, Asset Information Group Team Leader, Highways England described the digital model of the English highway system.  Stan Burns, President, Integrated Inventory, who has just retired from Utah DoT, described Utah DoT's comprehensive database of every piece of highway furniture and signage in the Utah highway system.  Together these represent the future of the digitalization of national highway systems.

A new company, Indoor Reality, is the third startup of Dr Avideh Zakhor, who is on leave from the University of California Berkeley.  Her new device is a backpack loaded with sensors including lasers and infrared that enables you to map the interior of buildings by simply walking through a multi-floor building, including up and down stairs.  The resulting data can be used to automatically generate floor plans and 3D models and captures everything you need for an Energy Plus analysis.

Mark Shell and Darrell Gadberry, both of the City of Fort Worth Water Department, described a very versatile device with laser and sonar and camera devices on board that can be used for sewer line inspections of small and large diameter sewer pipes.  Fundamentally this device enables condition-based maintenance of municipal sewer systems.  Mark and Darrell reported that it has saved the Fort Worth Water Department $42 million.

I was able to interview Dr Avideh Zakhor, Nicolas Arnold, Ron Singh, Larry Kleinkemper of Lanmar Services who specialize in creating BIM models for existing buildings, and Greg Bentley of Bentley who has a broad, forward-looking perspective on the "digitalization" of infrastructure.

Highlights of GeoBuiz Summit: Intel's indoor positioning chipset

I spent a couple of of very worthwhile days in Washington DC this week attending GeoBuiz Summit.  A top highlight of the sessions was the presentation by Greg Turetzky, Principal Engineer in the GNSS and Location Strategy group at Intel.  Greg described a new chipset for wireless connectivity (Wi-Fi) in mobile devices that includes in-chip support for indoor location positioning.

Indoor mapping is already supported by Google and Bing.  Micello is in the business of creating indoor maps of major venues around the world.  Most of the activity seems to be focussed on consumers and locations such as malls, airports and department stores.  A typical indoor application would lead you directly to particular products in a mall or department store.

The major problem that distinguishes indoor from outdoor location and mapping is that there is no widely recognized indoor equivalent of GPS.  When you are outside of buildings on most of the Earth's surface you can use GPS or other GNSS systems  to determine where you, other people and things are.  But as soon as you walk into a building, GPS no longer works.  Tracking people and objects in a building has been one of the major challenges facing the geospatial industry.

There have been many attempts to solve this problem.  Tracking cell phone location using RFID, accelerometers, or installing transmitters with low frequency radio frequency waves that are not as affected by walls as high frequency waves.  The prevalence of WiFi has made possible using Wifi signals from transmitters with known locations to triangulate location.

The business benefit of indoor location is significant because it increases the value of your assets - when you can locate equipment and facilities easily, you will use them more.  In the case of hospitals it can be a matter of life and death to find the "crash cart" in seconds rather than minutes.

The Open Geospatial Consortium's  IndoorGML Standards Working Group has released an IndoorGML Encoding Standard.  IndoorGML has been developed to provide a schema framework for interoperability between indoor spatial applications such as indoor location services, indoor web map services, indoor emergency control, guiding services for visually handicapped persons in indoor space, and indoor robotics.  The IndoorGML standard specifies an open data model and XML schema for indoor spatial information. IndoorGML is an application schema of OGC GML and intentionally focuses on modelling indoor spaces for navigation purposes.

Intel's 8270 chipset, which is based on the 802.11mc standard, is able to provide 2-3 meter accuracy 90% of the time.  Intel's indoor location technology relies on fine time measurement (FTM) which measures the distance between a handheld device and 802.11mc-compliant Wi-Fi access points.  Multilateration is used to compute the device's location.

The chipset is available.  There is a video of the chipset in use.  Intel is encouraging geospatial developers to create mobile apps using the chipset.

Predictions of the future of the utility business 2015-2018

For the first time in a hundred years, the electric power utility industry is undergoing a momentous change. Distributed renewable power generation, especially solar photovoltaics (PV), is introducing competition into an industry that has been managed as regulated monopolies. Consumers with solar PV panels on their roofs are fundamentally changing the traditional utility business model. A recent report from the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) report refers to disruptive challenges that threaten to force electric power utilities to change or adapt the business model that has been in place since the first half of the 20th century.

Most utilities are in the midst of deploying smart grids, which basically amounts to applying the internet to the electric power grid to link intelligent electronic devices, sensors and grid control applications to enable data-driven decision making.  One of the most important changes driven by the implementation of smart grid is the much greater importance of location. Geospatial technology (location, geospatial data management and spatial analytics) is seen as foundational techology for the smart grid.

The other major global change in energy is the shift in energy demand from the world's advanced economies to emerging economies.   Energy demand from OECD countries has hit a plateau.  Currently China is driving world energy demand. The International Energy Agency's (IEA) World Energy Outlook 2014 projects that in the future  as demand slows from China, world energy demand will be driven by India, the Middle East, and Africa and Latin America.

Recently IDC Energy Insights released a report IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Utilities 2015 Predictions with predictions for the future of the utility business.  Some of these are startling, suggesting that the utility industry is going to experience fundamental changes in how they do business over the next few years.

New business models

IDC predicts that utilities will be looking less at generation as a source of revenue.  IDC predicts that by 2018 45% of new data traffic in utilities' control systems will originate from distributed energy resources that are not owned by the utility.

To make up for this loss of generation revenue IDC predicts that utilities will be looking for new business opportunities such as services.  Specifically, IDC predicts that utilities will derive at least 40% of their earnings from new business models by 2017.

Technology

• Cloud - By 2018 cloud services will make up half of the IT portfolio for over 60% of utilities.
• Integration - In 2015 utilities will invest over a quarter of their IT budgets on integrating new technologies with legacy enterprise systems.
• Analytics - By 2017 45% of utilities' new investment in analytics will be used in operations and maintenance of plant and network infrastructure.
• Mobility - 60% of utilities will focus on transitioning enterprise mobility to capitalize on the consumer mobility wave.
• Smart systems - By 2018 cognitive systems will penetrate utilities' customer operation to improve service and reduce costs.

Some  of the important drivers for these trends include the global redistribution of energy demand from the world's advanced to the emerging economies, the rapid emergence of cloud-based provisioning and services, increasing regulatory pressure responding to customer demand to improve energy market transparency and competitiveness, cross-industry competition for technical, especially IT skills, smart analytics, and virtual and augmented reality beginning to be applied in business.

Top 10 technology trends

In March 2014 Gartner, Inc. identified the top ten technology trends which it saw impacting the global energy and utility markets.  There is considerable overlap between IDC's business predictions and the technology trends identified by Gartner, Inc.

Social Media

Social media are beginning to be used as a customer acquisition and retention medium, as a consumer engagement channel to drive customer participation in energy efficiency programs, a source of information about outages, and as the emerging area of crowd-sourcing distributed energy resources coordination. Social media are also being used by utilities for communicating information about outages with customers.

Big Data

Smart grid will increase the quantity of data that utilities have to manage by a factor of about 10,000 according to a recent estimate.  This trend is driven by intelligent devices, sensors, social networks, and new IT and OT applications such as advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), synchrophasors, smart appliances, microgrids, advanced distribution management, remote asset monitoring, and self-healing networks.  The type of data that utilities will need to manage will change: for example, real-time data from sensors and intelligent devices including smart phones and unstructured data from social networks will play a much greater role for utilities in the future.

Mobile and Location-Aware Technology

Mobile and location-aware technology which includes hardware (laptops and smartphones), communication products (GPS-based navigation, routing and tracking technologies), social networks (Twitter,Facebook and others) and services (WiFi, satellites, and packet switched networks) are transforming all industries.  Utilities for the most part have been slow to adopt consumer mobile technology, but  this is changing.

Cloud Computing

Acccording to Gartner, areas such as smart meter, big data analytics, demand response coordination and GIS are driving utilities to adopt cloud-based solutions.  Early adopters of cloud technologies include small utilities with limited in-house IT skills and budgets, organizations which provide application and data services to multiple utilities, such as cooperative associations and transmission system operators,  and investor-owned utilities (IoUs) conducting short-term smart grid pilots.

Sensor Technology

Sensors, which are being applied extensively throughout the entire supply, transmission and distribution domains of utilities, provide a stream of real-time information from which a real-time state of the grid can be derived.

IT and OT Convergence

Virtually all new technology projects in utilities will require a combination of IT and OT investment and planning, such as AMI or advanced distribution management systems (ADMSs).  This will be a challenge for many utilities, especially smaller ones, which don't have in-house IT skills.

Advanced Metering Infrastructure

AMI provides a communication backbone aimed at improving distribution asset utilization and facilitating consumer inclusion in energy markets.

Internet of Things

Sensors and actuators embedded in physical objects are linked through wired and wireless networks, using the same Internet Protocol (IP) that connects the Internet.  When intelligent objects can both sense the environment and communicate, they become tools for understanding utility grids and responding to changes in near real-time.  Following McKinsey there are two key benefits arising from the Internet of Things for utilities

• Enhanced situational awareness - acheiving real-time awareness of physical environment, in this case, the grid
• Sensor-driven decision analytics - assisting human decision making through deep analysis and data visualization

Asset performance management

Traditional asset management approaches are too limiting for today’s performance-based, data-driven utility environment. Asset performance management solutions need to deliver real-time equipment performance, reliability, maintenance and decision support for effective resource management so that operations and maintenance teams are empowered with real-time decision support information, providing the right information to the right people at the right time and in the right context.  The result is improved operational performance and better asset availability and utilization.

Business Intelligence and Advanced Analytics

Analytics will become essential as the volume of data generated by intelligent devices and sensors, mobile devices (the Internet of Things) and social media increases and huge pools of structured and unstructured data need to be analyzed to extract actionable information.  Analytics will become embedded everywhere, often invisibly.

FAA issues grants of exemption for commercial UAV operations for construction monitoring, agriculture, and real estate

In general the operation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) for commercial purposes is illegal in the U.S.  But in the last few months the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has issues grants of exemption to six companies for commercial UAVs for general aerial surveys (Trimble, Woolpert) and specifically for construction monitoring (Clayco, Inc), agriculture (Advanced Aviation Solutions), on and offshore oil and gas inspections (VDOS Global), and real estate (Douglas Trudeau, Realtor).

In 2011 the FAA fined a UAV operator $10,000 for flying a radio-controlled airplane recklessly over the University of Virginia campus to make a commercial for the University.  Early in 2014 a National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Judge ruled that the FAA ban on flying UAVs was not legally binding. The judge said that the FAA had historically exempted model aircraft from the statutory definitions of aircraft.  March 7 the FAA issued a notice saying that it was appealing the decision to the full National Transportation Safety Board.  The FAA cited its regulation of  model aircraft under the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 (FMRA) which states that “if a model aircraft operator endangers the safety of the National Airspace System, the FAA has the authority to take enforcement action against those operators for those safety violations.”  November 18 the NTSB supported the FAA saying that an unmanned aircraft is subject to enforcement of FAA regulations prohibiting reckless operation of aircraft.

The FAA has issued 14 grants of exemption for commercial operation of UAVs.  The first was to a manufacturer of UAVs used in film production.  The FAA found that a "grant of exemption is in the public interest. Therefore ... Astraeus Aerial is granted an exemption ... to the extent necessary to allow Astraeus to  operate unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) for the purpose of scripted, closed-set filming for  the motion picture and television industry."

The requirements for operation of the UAV imposed by the FAA are restrictive (Astraeus Aerial Grant of Exemption);

• The UAV must weigh less than 55 pounds.
• The UA can not be flown at a ground speed exceeding 50 knots.
• Flights must be operated at an altitude of no more than 400 feet above ground level (AGL).
• The UA must be operated within visual line of sight (VLOS) of the pilot at all times.
• All operations must utilize a visual observer (VO). The VO and the pilot must be able to communicate verbally at all times.
• The pilot must possess at least a private pilot certificate and at least a current third-class medical certificate.
• The pilot must have accumulated and logged a minimum of five hours operating the UAV.
• The UAV may not be operated directly (within 500 ft) over any person, except authorized and consenting production personnel.
• Each UAV operation must be completed within 30 minutes flight time or with 25% battery power remaining, whichever occurs first.
• The operator must obtain an Air Traffic Organization (ATO) issued Certificate of Waiver or Authorization (COA) prior to any operations under this grant of exemption.
• The UAV must remain clear and yield the right of way to all other manned operations and activities at all times (ultralight vehicles, parachute activities, parasailing activities, hang gliders, etc.).
• UAV operations may not be conducted at night.
• The UAV may not be operated by a pilot from a moving device or vehicle.
• The UAV may not be operated less than 500 feet below or less than 2,000 feet horizontally from a cloud or when visibility is less than 3 statute miles.

This is certainly not going to allow the deployment of long range UAVs like the Silent Falcon with a daytime endurance estimated to be 5 to 12 hours depending on wing configuration, weather, and flight profile. Night-time endurance is estimated at 3 to 5 hours.  For example, equipped with LiDAR this could be used for transmission line monitoring for vegetation management at a much lower cost than a manned helicopter.

December 10 the FAA issued grants of exemption to four additional companies;

• Clayco, Inc. , a general contractor, to operate unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) for the purpose of aerial imaging to monitor and ensure safety of construction sites.
• Trimble Navigation Ltd, a provider of advanced location-based solutions, to allow Trimble to operate the UX5 UAS for the special purpose of precision aerial surveys that consist of still photographs taken by an onboard camera.
• VDOS Global, LLC, a provider of aerial inspection services to the on and off-shore oil & gas industry,  to allow VDOS to operate unmanned aircraft systems for the purpose of flare stack inspections on 14 Shell Oil Gulf of Mexico production platforms with all platforms beyond 12 nautical miles of the coast of the United States.
• Woolpert, Inc, a design, geospatial and infrastructure management firm, to allow Woolpert to operate the Altavian Nova Block III unmanned aircraft system for the special purpose of precision aerial surveys that consist of still photographs taken by an onboard camera.

January 5 two more exemptions were granted;

• Douglas Trudeau, a realtor, to operate unmanned aircraft systems for the purpose of aerial videography/cinematography and augment real estate listing videos.
• Advanced Aviation Solutions to operate unmanned aircraft systems for the purpose of aerial imagery to support agriculture.