A GNSS antenna, short for Global Navigation Satellite System, is a device designed to receive and transmit signals from navigation satellite constellations, such as GPS (Global Positioning System), GLONASS (Global Navigation Satellite System), Galileo and BeiDou. These antennas are used to receive the signals emitted by these satellites in order to determine their position, speed and time with great precision.
When a 3D scanner is equipped with a GNSS antenna, it can receive signals from navigation satellites and use this data to determine its own position and orientation in space with high precision. This allows 3D point clouds generated by the scanner to be georeferenced, ensuring accurate integration of the data into a global geographic coordinate system. As a result, users can obtain accurate, georeferenced 3D models of their environment, which is essential for many applications, such as urban planning, natural resource management and infrastructure modeling.
A GNSS antenna is very sensitive to its environment and can encounter several problems that can affect its accuracy, including:
Although it may highly impact some mobile scanning systems, the quality of MS-96 data is not impacted by the loss of GNSS reception. This is thanks to 2 factors:
But what about environments captured with low dynamics (pedestrian, motorized at low speed) and without structures for SLAM? Here too, there is a solution. More information in a later article 😉
As part of a project aimed at evaluating a paid parking area, located both outdoors and indoors, we implemented the versatility of the MS-96 Viametris. The scanning process began outdoors, with the MS-96 installed on the roof of a moving car. Then, our technician continued on foot on the sidewalk, with the MS-96 carried in backpack mode, before continuing the scan on foot in an underground parking lot, as the vehicle equipped with the MS-96 mounted on the roof could not access the car park, due to height limitations. Here are the results obtained.
