University of Bradford takes delivery of high-end 3D mobile mapping system

The University of Bradford has taken delivery of the UK’s first Leica TRK700 Evo – a vehicle-mounted mobile mapping system capable of capturing two million data points every second to a resolution of 1mm. The state-of-the-art device will be used to expand the digital twin of the city. Called ‘Virtual Bradford’, digital the twin initially covered 3.5km of the historic city centre but has since been expanded to cover Saltaire, a Victorian model village and UNESCO World Heritage Site. 

Professor Andrew Wilson, from the University of Bradford’s School of Archaeological and Forensic Sciences, said: “We’re delighted that we now have the very first Pegasus TRK700 Evo unit in the UK. This has been made possible by substantive investment from the Arts & Humanities Research Council’s (AHRC) Capability for Collections (CapCo) fund and has already been put to work documenting the Saltaire World Heritage Site, as part of ‘People, Heritage & Place’, one of nine knowledge exchange projects funded through the AHRC Place Programme.” The CapCo scheme paves a roadmap towards enhanced national capability for conservation and heritage science.

“The first run with the new device captured the Canal Road link between the City Centre and Saltaire, as well as the entirety of the Saltaire World Heritage Site, in just two and a half hours – a distance of 29.18km – with 87,471 images and a total of 2,050,834,333 exported points,” commented Tom Sparrow, a senior scientist in visualizing heritage at the university, who has been at the forefront of working with data captured with the Leica TRK.

“We enjoy a close working partnership with City of Bradford Metropolitan District Council and are delighted to see the importance of digital twins in place-based research at a time when Bradford is developing the runway to 2025 and Bradford’s role as UK City of Culture,” added Professor Chris Gaffney, pro-vice chancellor for research & innovation. “As we continue to work together to extend the reach of Virtual Bradford, it is clear that the use of transformative digital technologies to develop digital twins will help the city, its residents and visitors in a multitude of different ways.”

New tools for aerial, terrestrial and mobile mapping

Shane Gwilt, mobile mapping and utility detection manager for Leica Geosystems in the UK, said: “The TRK700 Evo system [has] a combination of sensors including two Z+F profilers, picking up a million points of data per second each, along with the camera attachments giving us high resolution colorized point cloud data, with SLAM technology and a range of other sensors to provide accurate real-time positioning data whilst on the move. This is a fantastic acquisition for the university… and it’s a fantastic partnership.”

Steven Duffy, reality capture specialist at Leica Geosystems, added: “As part of the investment made by the University of Bradford, there’s the Leica TRK700 Evo, the BLK2FLY autonomous flying laser scanner, and the BLKARC autonomous laser scanning module for robots, as well as the RTC360 terrestrial laser scanner, and a multitude of software to enable the University of Bradford to be able to scan and progress towards their targets in capturing Bradford and beyond.”

Virtual Bradford is fundamental to Bradford Council’s approach to data-driven decision-making. As an open dataset, it will be used to boost investment in the city with applications ranging from regeneration by developers through to the Bradford 2025 Delivery team who are already considering using Virtual Bradford as a method of signposting events and places.