Feature
HxDR for reality capture In 2005 Leica Geosystems, maker of laser scanners and surveying devices, was acquired by Hexagon AB. In 2010, Leica launched the revolutionary BLK360 small format scanner. Since then, it has steadily fleshed out a complete BLK ecosystem. Martyn Day visited the company at its HQ in Zurich, Switzerland, to learn about the latest developments
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rands (and people’s perception of them) are interesting things. Historically, Leica Geosystems, being Swiss, would probably fall into my stereotype of high-value engineering, coming at a premium cost. But, given the company introduced the BLK360 laser scanner in 2018 for £15k, bundled with Autodesk’s Recap, this would be wrong. Leica’s offering was aggressively priced. At the time, its smallest and lowest cost competitor, the Faro Focus3D, came in around £22k. It seemed that Leica was simply testing the market, but with hindsight, that assumption seems to have been completely incorrect! Leica has gone on to continue to deliver new form factors for the scanning market, building up a range of innovative and beautifully designed scanning products. BLK2GO is a handheld portable scanner, which utilises SLAM (simultaneous localisation and mapping) technology to capture interior and exterior laser scans through the simple act of walking around. BLK2FLY is a drone variant of the BLK2GO – but, in saying that, it completely underestimates the engineer38
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ing work that has gone into its design (see box out for more info). Next to be released was the BLK ARC, which again leans on the BLK2GO design but is a module for autonomous reality capture, initially destined for Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot. In just a few short years, Leica has a fully productised its range of portable scanners, which can be carried by hand, flown and even by robot. They all share the same beautiful industrial design and all feed into the company’s Cyclone 3D point cloud processing software, although more and more of the processing
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(cleaning up, registration) is becoming automated on device. This is a long way from historical tripod-based scanning strategies which take way longer to capture and process. However, the larger nonSLAM scanners still benefit from range and accuracy. With a now-obvious product evolution plan moving to mobile scanning, the next part of this, seems to be to connect the Leica data capture devices to a central cloud backbone. For this, Leica has developed a cloud-based, WebGL-based service that is called HxDR.
The HxDR platform Launched in January 2020, the concept of HxDR is to connect the sensor hardware directly to the cloud. Whilst in the cloud, all the processing is carried out, all the holes within the point cloud are filled up to get coherent mesh, and then brought back to the user through a thin client, such as web browser, so the user can view the data, perform measurements, etc. There’s no human intervention; it’s all automatic. As part of the processing, HDxR subdivides and multi-levels the data automatically. Similar to game engine technology, on initial load, you get a lowwww.AECmag.com
