NEXUS Performs Emergency Survey
HYPACK’s NEXUS UAV performs emergency survey to assess damage to California dam
A critical need for data.
Recent extreme flooding events in California have taken its toll on the state’s water infrastructure. When the Oroville Dam event required an immediate and timely survey to assess damage, emergency response teams turned to the surveyor and engineers to provide the necessary technical expertise to properly mitigate the event. But who do professional surveyors and engineers turn to when they need access to survey grade data in times of need? They turn to tools that they can trust because lives can literally depend on it.
The NEXUS 800 Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) was built as a tool to handle these scenarios. Its’ underlying foundation is built upon the underlying principle of turning data into information quickly. Additionally, the NEXUS puts an emphasis on performing real time sensor fusion. Simply put: “It’s all about the data.” So, when licensed professional surveyors and engineers from eTrac (California), SurvTech Solutions (Florida), and Brunswick Engineering (New Brunswick, Canada) needed a LiDAR enabled UAV, they leveraged the NEXUS to attain survey grade LiDAR data that was expeditiously processed and disseminated to the mitigation teams for action.
Due to the complexity of the terrain, the team utilized the real time capabilties of HYPACK to monitor and respond accordingly through the use of the HYPACK Matrix and Real Time Cloud modules to safely navigate the terrain. This increased situational awareness and real time feedback allowed the team to perform multiple sorties safely and efficiently. The surveyors operating under CFR 14 Part 107 also effectively integrated themselves into an airspace with other small helicopter and heavy lift Skycranes.
Once on the ground. The team utilized HYPACK’s end to end software pipeline, rapidly processing the data and utilizing HYPACK’s latest capabilities that will automatically register any spatially referenced imagery to colorize the LiDAR point cloud which can then be exported into many formats such as LAS version 1.4. In the following examples, a data comparison is depicted highlighting some of the information that can be gleaned from the same dataset.