Quantification of Systematic Distance Deviations for Scanning Total Stations Using Robotic Applications

Abstract

The incidence angle (IA) of the measuring beam and influences due to different materials cause unacceptable systematic deviations when it comes to high-precision surveying tasks in the field of engineering geodesy. For the determination of these distance deviations, an approach is introduced, which is based on the absolute comparison between reference measurements and laser scans. However, the implementation of the developed method, which reveals this influence for scanning total stations, was conducted manually by an operator. Thus, the invested expenditure is considered to be very high. In this paper, a further development of the approach is presented which mainly introduces robotic-based automations in order to significantly reduce the required effort for data acquisition. We show that the automation has nearly no impact on the accuracy of the obtained error curves, as these are consistent to results obtained about three years ago. Furthermore, a higher discretization level of the error curves could be achieved.