Mobile Mapping Surveyor Brings Advanced Technologies to the Classroom
Associate professor at NJIT’s School of Applied Engineering and Technology, Laramie Potts, works to ensure his students in the Surveying Engineering Technology program have the opportunity to experience the technological instruments the career has to offer. With the creation of a home-brew mobile autonomous surveyor vehicle, Potts wants to make the students’ experience more complete.
Placed over a chassis that formerly belonged to a remote-controlled car are three tiers of plywood, each carrying important components that collect data. At the bottom there’s a depth camera and power distribution, and the second level includes a computer designed for AI application and a LiDAR sensor. The third level holds a multispectral camera, a camera first-person view and gimbal. There’s also a GPS, inertial measuring unit and antennas. All the components are carefully oriented to avoid interference from the magnetic field each generates.
Langan, an industry partner with the program, previously came to campus and showcased a mobile mapping vehicle. Students saw it in action, but Potts felt that they weren’t getting the full experience as they viewed this nicely manufactured vehicle. “You don't see the parts, you don’t see what is rotating. You just see this techno-cool mapping vehicle going down the road, and producing virtual reality videos and 3D maps,” said Potts.
Potts saw it imperative to provide a laboratory exercise that would allow his students to see the wide-range of possibilities his program has to offer. He didn’t want the students to just get data; he wants them to be part of the collection and to be in the environment and ask themselves, “Does this make sense?”
“Students and the general public don't know what surveying is, or the word surveying is so archaic in their mind they think it's like a blue collar job. So in a way of creating some eminence to the sophistication that these graduates need to have in the toolbox is the vehicle because the vehicle has to do with modern technology, remote sensing and statistical analysis of data,” Potts explained. “It's not just the sensors, the computing capacity, and then what if a student just wants to work with the LiDAR data, that by itself is also quite a big data set.”
After initial conversations and sharing of ideas, Potts joined forces with an adjunct professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Technology program, Wilex N. Amboise.
Amboise, who teaches numerical technology, says a semester cannot pass without him building something. Among his collection is a 3D-printed skull with a motion sensor placed below it that makes the skull’s eyes close when there’s no motion in front of it.
“I personally don't have the skill to do all of this robotic integration,” said Potts. “That's why Wilex from the ECET program, and I work together. So one day, he was showing me some robotic project that he was working on. Then, I thought to myself, ‘Hey, maybe we can do something with this vehicle.’”
It took Potts and Amboise seven weeks to create their mobile autonomous surveyor vehicle. During the process of building the robot, the Makerspace provided tools and equipment to improve their model. The Makerspace team helped recover parts of a broken drone, like the camera and gimbal, and incorporate it into the vehicle.
The system is designed to be modular and flexible, allowing it to be mounted on drones, boats or other vehicles.
The rover is already impacting undergraduate student learning
Potts feels that the creation of this vehicle will help his students find their personal and professional interests. His plan is for it to be used in research and multidisciplinary teaching. “The fourth industrial revolution predicts that the traditional and conventional engineering, civil and surveying engineering will be dramatically impacted by artificial intelligence,” he noted.
Geospatial artificial intelligence, or GeoAI, is going to have a dramatic impact on the professional side of the geospatial industry. “We believe that this custom designed, built, autonomous mobile mapping rover, the AMMR, provides an immersive laboratory where students can see the technology, recognize what it is on the ground, and it's not all nicely packaged, like a manufactured full scale model vehicle.
“They can actually touch it and feel it,” he said.
Students will be presented with opportunities to work with LiDAR and the multispectral data, which are very complex and typically belong in a graduate program. However, the AMMR is already impacting undergraduate student learning. A student is working on his capstone project on Scan-to-BIM using the point cloud of the second floor of the GITC building surveyed by the rover.
“We think we can provide this opportunity to teach undergrads at least the fundamentals of how these things will operate, so that they can attack the problems of the future a little bit more comfortably.”
