Utilities & Infrastructure

Laan Labs builds field software for utility owners and operators, contractors, municipalities and surveyors who need to know exactly what is in the ground and on the site, and to find it again. Crews capture assets as 3D scans tied to surveyed GNSS positions, collect points, lines and areas with their own feature codes, and later walk back to any asset with augmented reality showing direction and distance. The approach is embodied in OpenSurvey3D, Laan Labs' open-source app for 3D scanning, GNSS surveying and AR asset finding.

Records of buried and built infrastructure drift from reality. As-builts are drawn from memory after the trench is closed, assets are mapped to the nearest few meters, and the knowledge of where things really are leaves with the people who installed them. The window to fix that is short: while a trench is open or a structure is exposed, a phone scan locked to an RTK position records the pipe, the fittings, the depth and the surroundings in minutes, in real coordinates, for good.

Laan Labs has hands-on experience with the equipment as well as the software, having integrated GNSS receivers and survey hardware from Emlid, Leica, Trimble and Bad Elf, among others, and builds the workflow to be honest about accuracy: a centimeter-grade RTK fix is never presented the same way as a phone position.

How Laan Labs helps

Open-trench and as-built capture

LiDAR and photo scans of exposed pipes, ducts, fittings and structures, anchored to a surveyed observation before backfill, giving a measurable as-built that shows what was installed and exactly where.

Asset inventory and field collection

Points, lines and areas for poles, valves, manholes, hydrants, cabinets and corridors, collected with the organization's own feature codes, attributes and photographs, at the accuracy the job requires.

RTK georeferencing

Support for the phone's location, external sub-meter receivers and RTK rovers with NTRIP corrections, with fix state, estimated accuracy, satellites and antenna offsets stored with every observation.

AR asset finding

Stored coordinates shown as pins over the camera view with bearing and distance, so a crew can walk back to a buried valve or a control point without hunting. It is a finding aid: it does not replace utility locates or numeric stakeout where a position must be confirmed.

GIS as the system of record

Import of existing asset and design data in CSV, GeoJSON, GPX and KML, and export as GeoJSON, CSV, DXF and LandXML in the project coordinate frame, with direct integration to a GIS or asset management platform where required.

Inspection of structures and corridors

Repeatable captures of tunnels, culverts, bridges, roads and facilities, with findings tied to location and compared between visits to show change.

Field quality assurance

Check shots against known coordinates, residuals and tolerances, and a QA report that travels with the data, so the office can accept field work on evidence.

Where to start

A practical first project is one crew and one activity, such as documenting service installations before backfill or inventorying a class of asset in one district. Laan Labs configures or builds the capture workflow around the existing codes, coordinate system and receivers, and the results are checked against control before the approach is extended.

Organizations that want to evaluate the workflow at no cost can start with OpenSurvey3D, which is free and MIT licensed, and engage Laan Labs to adapt it, integrate it with their GIS, or build a dedicated application on the same foundation.

Laan Labs products in this field

• OpenSurvey3D — Open-source 3D scanning, GNSS surveying and AR asset finding
• RadianceView — Scans, splats and photographs as one inspection record

Common questions