Aerial LiDAR, a method that sends pulses of laser light to determine the presence of objects in great detail, gathers millions of laser returns to construct a point cloud of the area or corridor being scanned. Even through heavily vegetated areas, it is able to provide ground data for design and estimation.

From a production standpoint, pilots and operators can fly over 5,000 acres a week and cover more than 500 miles a week in rural settings. This method provides diverse data for those looking to gather site information, such as contours, earth movement volumetrics, site change overlays, solar siting studies and more. The image capture penetrates through objects in which light passes through — which is called returns. Most commercial systems, which lack high laser intensity, can only penetrate through transparent objects four or five times before they stop. For Burns & McDonnell, a higher-powered system that performs 12-15 returns before stopping is used, which provides a much higher quality and depth of data acquired.

Though ARS in various technical capacities and sensors has been around for quite some time, it is becoming more commonly used in different kinds of projects. For its many uses — including natural resources monitoring; disaster assessment and mitigation and data collection, research and management — ARS has numerous benefits. Among them:

• Highly accurate, low cost and efficient site contouring and volumetrics of a large site area.
• Durability through time as the data collected is repeatable and can be used for different projects or applications from one capture — this will ultimately save costs on future projects.
• Proven compliance to plans, project earned value, volumetric validation and as-built site conditions through the use of low-cost repeated ARS captures.
• Improved safety in project execution, enabling inspection and data gathering of otherwise inaccessible terrain.