It seems Leica and Optech may have come a bit under „crossfire“ (-: by the other big news (besides adding PulseWaves support to RiPROCESS) at the RIEGL LiDAR 2013 user conference in Vienna, namely the unveiling of the new LMS-Q1560 airborne laser scanner. Below you see the management team doing the ceremonial act.
The specification looks great and will especially make those happy looking for dense surveys in complex terrain or for more LiDAR returns from building facades in urban environments. By employing two units that „crossfire“ at a particular angle while one unit looks forward and one backward, the combined system can provide a better point spacing on the ground and a better point coverage on vertical surfaces.
The new system combines two LMS-Q780 units each firing at rates of up 400 kHz via a shared rotating mirror in the center. The scan lines of the two laser-beam-emitting units are not perpendicular to the flight direction but angled at +12 and -12 degrees (actual number may be different) in the x-y plane to assure that they independently and consistently sample the covered terrain – unaffected from flying height or aircraft speed. Furthermore, the two fanning sheets of laser pulses are angled at +7 and -7 degrees (actual number may be different) in flight direction, meaning that one unit is forward-looking and the other backward-looking. This increases the likelihood that the sides of buildings are scanned as well. Colloquially put, those back-facing facades perpendicular to the flight direction that are not seen by the first round of laser pulses from the forward-looking unit will be hit by the second round of laser pulses from the backward-looking unit and vice-versa. The above details may not be 100% correct but are what I (wrongly?) remember from the technical presentation that Dr. Ullrich gave (see below).
The overall ability to sample so rapidly is realized by combining the „crossfire“ that I have just described with the „rapidfire“ of the earlier Q780 units. Each unit is able to operate with up to 10 pulses simultaneously in the air by subsequently resolving ambiguities off-line with the multiple-time-around (MTA) processing technique introduced for earlier models (see the product descriptions for the Q680i or the Q780 for more on that topic).
Hence, this new scanner with „crossfire technology“ promises to give your terrain a dense cross examination … and yes, it is a full waveform scanner. (-: