LiDAR Scanning & 3D Mapping

LiDAR sees through canopy. That’s the difference: where photo-based mapping struggles with vegetation, our drone-mounted laser scanners fire millions of pulses per second and record what comes back from the bare earth underneath. The result is a survey-grade 3D point cloud of your site: terrain, structures, vegetation, and noise all classified separately and exportable to whatever software your engineers use.

What we hand back after a LiDAR mission

• Classified point cloud in .LAS or .LAZ: ground, low vegetation, high vegetation, buildings, and noise returned as separate classes so your civil software can use just what it needs.
• Bare-earth Digital Terrain Model (DTM) for grading, drainage, and earthworks design.
• Digital Surface Model (DSM) capturing tree canopy and structures on top of the DTM.
• Contour lines at the interval your project requires.
• Intensity raster: the LiDAR’s own grayscale layer, useful for picking out ground features under leaf cover.
• Accuracy report tied to ground control with vertical residuals at each check point.
• CAD-ready exports (DWG / DXF) on request, sized to drop straight into Civil 3D, MicroStation, or your platform of choice.

Survey-grade hardware, defensible accuracy

The platforms we fly are survey-grade LiDAR payloads on multi-rotor or VTOL frames, with integrated INS/GNSS and post-processed (PPK) or real-time (RTK) corrections. Vertical accuracy on a well-controlled site can hit the centimeter range; we report against ASPRS Positional Accuracy Standards and align quality levels with the USGS Lidar Base Specification when public-agency work calls for it. Every project gets a ground-control plan before we fly.

The questions buyers ask first

• What vertical accuracy can you actually achieve on my site? We scope that against terrain, vegetation density, and control plan before flight: and report against it after.
• What’s your ground control plan? We set targets and survey them with a separate GNSS receiver; you see the plan before mobilization.
• What’s the turnaround? Standard delivery for processed point clouds and DTM/DSM is within a few business days of flight; CAD exports and contours follow the same week.
• Who owns the raw data? You do. Every deliverable is yours, including the unclassified raw scan.
• Will the deliverable drop into our GIS / civil software without reformatting? We confirm the target platform and format on the scoping call so the file lands ready to use.
• Weather limits? LiDAR flies in conditions photogrammetry can’t: overcast and even light precipitation are usually fine. Heavy wind grounds us. We don’t fly to a deliverable date at the expense of safety.

Who buys this

Civil engineering firms, mining and aggregate operators, state and county DOTs, energy-corridor owners, and land developers. The common thread: vegetation, terrain, or both make a traditional photogrammetric survey unreliable, and the project needs a defensible bare-earth model.

How it’s priced

• Per-acre for area mapping or per-linear-mile for corridor work
• Mobilization fee for distance, multi-day, or after-hours flights
• Fixed processing line item covers classification, DTM/DSM, contours, accuracy report
• Rates fall sharply as site size grows: the per-acre on 50 acres is much lower than the per-acre on 5

We don’t publish a rate card because every site is different. Send us the boundary, the deliverable format you need, and the date you want it back: we’ll quote the project, not a generic rate.