Septentrio and Xenomatix drive mm-accurate mapping and pavement analysis

Lidar developer Xenomatix and GNSS specialist Septentrio have announced a new partnership. According to the agreement, the two Leuven-based companies will join forces to enable a high-quality lidar solution capable of providing millimeter accurate 3D mapping and analysis of pavement conditions coupled with extremely precise global positioning coordinates. To achieve this, Xenomatix will add Septentrio’s compact GNSS/INS receiver, the Asterx SBI3, to its Xenotrack platform for use by road surveyor and road management companies.

Traditional road scanning, based on laser profilers, relies solely on GNSS/INS to stitch consecutive profiles (pictures) together. Xenotrack, however, captures a 3D topography of an entire area in a single shot. The addition of Septentrio’s robust Asterx SBI3 high-performance real-time kinematic (RTK) GNSS/INS receiver with a dual antenna setup, ensures cm-accurate geotagging of the Xenotrack point cloud frames for relative and global millimeter accuracy. That together with Xenomatix’ sensor fusion algorithms and visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) techniques with GNSS+ enables dead-reckoning – a continuous positioning in environments of low satellite visibility where GNSS outages occur – and a seamless map of the road shape with unprecedented accuracy.