Underwater Lidar System
The INSCAN underwater laser imaging system has been presented by CDL, UK, and 3D at Depth, USA. The system provides fast, high-resolution 3D data capture for surveying, as-builts and monitoring, and will be showcased at the Subsea Tieback conference which is being held at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center in San Antonio, TX, USA, from 5 to 7 March 2013.
INSCAN is a subsea Lidar system that uses proprietary technology developed by 3D at Depth and engineered by CDL for use in subsea environments up to 3,000m in depth. The system collects up to 40,000 points per second, provides a 360 degree x 30 degree field of view and can either provide real-time operator measurements or output to industry-standard point clouds.
Accoriding to Neil Manning, president of CDL Inc, the use of laser scanning for metrology and inspection will drastically reduce the amount of time and costs while improving accuracy. The surface of how this technology can be used has now been scratched, and development for workflows and tooling for a variety of applications will be the next step.