The Applicability of the Rapid Handheld Laser Scanner to Underground Tunnel Suveying

Abstract

Laser scanned point clouds are important part of the modern work processes in mine industry. Inertia corrected handheld laser scanners are new type of apparatus commercially available from the year 2013 to gather point clouds. These devices are fast to use as the person scanning can walk when holding the device and the map is then automatically produced, however the resulted point cloud is most likely not as accurate as it is with standard industrial laser scanner. Having major advances in fast and easy scanning and a drawback of not so great accuracy might do the usage of the attained point cloud non trivial in industry. Based on experiments accuracy of the ZEB1 handheld laser scanner from Geoslam Ltd is studied in three underground field experiments. Obtained RMSE varied between 0.15 – 0.43 meters. It’s important to remember that these results are not mostly about accuracy of the ZEB1 (Zebedee) but about the accuracy of the whole measurement chain of personnel, measurement devices and the coordinate system used in the mine. Scanning speeds in experiments were astonishing from 5 to 13.5 tunnel meters per minute.