Speaker Bio & Abstract
Hexagon
USA
BiographyWith a 38-year career in the electro-optics industry, Ron Roth serves as the product manager for Airborne Topographic LiDAR at Leica Geosystems. In this role, he provides both technical and marketing inputs for product development and design on Leica Geosystems airborne topographic LiDAR systems.
Previous to this position, Ron was co-founder and business development director for Azimuth Corporation, where he managed all program, sales and marketing activities, including the development of the AeroScan Airborne LiDAR Mapping System, which later became the Leica ALS40.
Ron holds a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and a Master of Business Administration from Babson College. He was also awarded a United States patent for Remote Counter Balance Mechanism.AbstractDecision making increasingly relies on geospatial data, particularly dense, accurate and low-latency LiDAR point clouds in addition to imagery. Acquiring such data at reasonable cost implies the need to cover large amounts of terrain efficiently and consistently. Given the dominant role that flying costs play in the overall cost of geospatial data, new ways of acquiring data, processing data and distributing data must be introduced. From the acquisition perspective, the ability to collect both image and point cloud data simultaneously is driving technology toward hybrid sensors, thus minimizing airborne collection costs. New technologies, such as Single Photon LiDAR (SPL) can also allow point cloud collection over very large areas with extremely high effective pulse rates, further reducing flight costs. Processing raw data from such highly-efficient hybrid sensors is another opportunity for reducing costs of LiDAR data delivery, with simultaneous image and LiDAR processing in a distributed processing environment reducing timelines and minimizing human interaction. Finally, distribution of data to multiple end users in fly-once/use-many content business models provides opportunities for consolidation of acquisition and further cost reduction. The commercial availability of these three elements offers the ability to extract and efficiently deliver large amounts of geospatial data.