Creating-a-Healthier-Planet—SEMCOG

EIJ Article by Sudha Maheshwari, (Sanborn) and Ann Burns and Amy Mangus, of Southeast Michigan Council of Governments.

From smart data-collection planning to effective analysis and implementation, regional planners in Southeast Michigan are enabling urban sustainability and green infrastructure.

Urban sustainability involves a plethora of important issues confronting urban managers and planners, from climate change and air and water quality to stormwater management, flooding and many other interrelated social and environmental issues. Such issues force decision makers to balance the economic, environmental and societal outcomes of any action.

Click here to read the full article…

Sanborn Advances Indoor Mapping
SPIN Robotic Mapper a Leap Forward for Highly Accurate 2D and 3D Building Interior Mapping

Move over R2-D2! Designed exclusively for indoor mapping applications, the robotic Sanborn Platform for Indoor Mapping (SPIN) is a compact, easy-to-use, self-navigating system that generates preregistered spatial data in near real time.

SPIN delivers better than 3cm accuracy with a resolution as fine as 1cm as it records more than 200,000 measurements per second. With a 270-degree field of view, the Lidar-based system generates unprecedented 3-D detail while maintaining a Class 1 Eye Safety Rating.

“Indoor environments pose unique challenges for laser scanning with traditional static systems,” says Sharad Oberoi, Ph.D., Sanborn technical development manager and head of the R&D team that designed and built SPIN. “SPIN navigates autonomously in close-quarter environments and yields highly accurate results 20 times faster than a static system.”

With SPIN You Can:
  • Generate 2D floor plans
  • Create 3D models of indoor environments
  • Catalog inventory and / or assets

SPIN overcomes the time- and resource-consuming constraints of static systems by traveling at speeds of up to 50cm per second. The platform generates 2-D floor plans and 3-D models of unknown indoor environments without preplanned trajectory programming. It can avoid obstacles—including humans—in real time without intervention, and requires no targets within the scene.

Processing time for a 2-D floor layout is approximately equivalent to scanning time, while 3-D point cloud processing requires approximately 2.5 times scanning time. Dual Lidar sensors synchronize with an onboard 3-axis digital gyroscope, odometer and integrated depth camera to produce superior 3-D scene models. The output product is delivered in standard formats—LAS, ASCII and BIN.

Sanborn will demonstrate the SPIN platform next week, April 15-17, at the annual SPAR International 3D Measurement & Imaging Conference at the Broadmoor Hotel & Resort, Colorado Springs, Colo. Visit booth 611 to learn more.

For more information contact:
Jason Caldwell
jcaldwell@sanborn.com
The Sanborn Map Company

Sanborn Developers Participate In Winning Local Code-Off

A team of twenty and thirtysomethings huddled in a hot, brightly lit basement room, crammed elbow to elbow over MacBook Pros – a single display monitor pumping out code to represent data on a map of El Paso County.

In wool sweaters and shapely beards, the group of coders, developers, designers and entrepreneurs, paused only for a moments to refresh with beer, Coke or energy drinks before returning to their keyboards.

The group, named Local Sage, is one of five local teams participating in the statewide Go Code Colorado Challenge this weekend.

Read more at gazette.com

Sanborn Expands 3D Products Line with Stacking Plans Software

The Sanborn Map Company announces the expansion of its innovative 3D product line with the groundbreaking Sanborn 3D Stacking Plans.

Stacking plans originated as two-dimensional charts displaying the arrangement of tenants on floors in high-rise office buildings or condominiums. They are typically shaded or color-coded to represent lease terms of the building’s tenants, such as expiration date and square feet leased.

“Sanborn has taken stacking plans to the next level by creating a fully interactive 3D building, complete with floor plans and tenant maps,” says Dave Lorenzini, a 3D industry expert.

Sanborn delivers its affordable, fully interactive 3D Stacking Plans on demand, allowing users to quickly explore their buildings, floor plans and tenant maps from every angle. The easy-to-use product adds a new dimension to how people view, manage and explore properties.

“This is a game-changing tool for prospective tenants, investors, building owners or buyers,” says Ryan Garnett, Sanborn 3D visualization product manager. “The easy-to-use interactive controls let you effortlessly pan and tilt to view an entire building from virtually any angle, then zoom in on a single floor, or even a cubicle or office.”

Users can click on any part of a building for detailed building, lease and other key information. Sanborn’s 3D Stacking Plans are quickly created from your floor-plan pdf, property photos and tenant data. The turnkey service comes with easy-to-use Web, mobile and iPad viewers, and can be hosted as a link, e-mailed to clients or seamlessly integrated into your website.

With Sanborn’s custom 3D Stacking Plans, users can turn on and off walls, terrain and sky, and choose custom color schemes to complement existing sites. Also included is the fully customizable display of occupancy, lease rates and more.

For more information:

information@sanborn.com
Sanborn Exhibits UAS Technology at Colorado Farm Show

Jason Caldwell, with Sanborn, talks to a curious passerby as he shows off a drone at the Colorado Farm Show on Wednesday at the Island Grove Events Center in Greeley. While Caldwell wasn’t selling any drones he was talking with several local farmers and ranchers about possible applications for the unmanned aircraft.

Visit the Sanborn UAS Page for more information about Sanborn UAS Products and Services.
Sanborn Completes Dallas / Ft. Worth Metroplex Oblique Imagery Collection

Sanborn now offers highly detailed oblique imagery with unprecedented clarity for one of the country’s largest metropolitan areas.

Colorado Springs, Colo. (Jan. 28, 2014)—Oblique imagery data covering more than 2,700 square miles of the Dallas/Ft. Worth Metroplex has been acquired and processed by The Sanborn Map Company, Inc. The imagery offers a crisp ground sample distance (GSD) of 2.5 inches for most of the area in natural color (RGB). It was captured during 2013 with a five-camera configuration (nadir, north, south, east and west) and has unprecedented clarity.

“We are not aware of any other imagery acquisition covering an area this large at this resolution” says Sanchit Agarwal, Sanborn’s director of mapping operations. Agarwal added, “The resolution is phenomenal and so is the accuracy, which has been independently verified at twice the resolution or 5 inches in the 2.5 inch areas”.

“We’re eager to provide our customers the best possible information and solutions” says Learon Dalby, senior vice president, Business Solutions. Dalby adds that the imagery can be delivered to customers bundled with “Sanborn Oblique Analyst”.

“Sanborn Oblique Analyst is a comprehensive software package that offers several ways to extract and analyze information from oblique imagery,” explains Dalby. “We developed the solution based on customer requirements.”

The Sanborn oblique imagery product line includes imagery in standard industry formats, software options and storage options if required by the customer. Providing end to end geospatial solutions to meet customer needs is a foundation of Sanborn.

See examples of Sanborn oblique imagery at http://demo2.sanborn.com/COS/.

Customer inquiries can be directed to one of our U.S.-based sales team or contact us by email at: information@sanborn.com.

Sanborn invests in Visual Intelligence iOne n-Oblique Sensor System

Sanborn Map Company Purchases Visual Intelligence iOne n-Oblique Sensor System Solution After Extensive Evaluation. Leading Aerial Firm First to Deploy Industry’s Fastest, Most Accurate and Economical Oblique/3D Sensor

Houston-based Visual Intelligence announced today that Sanborn Map Company’s extensive evaluation of Visual Intelligence’s iOne n-Oblique Sensor System Solution for oblique and 3D imaging has resulted in a purchase. Sanborn is the first customer to deploy this new and innovative aerial digital camera system, the industry’s fastest, most stable, accurate, and economical sensor for oblique and 3D applications. Sanborn will deploy the iOne n-Oblique for 3D mapping contracts it holds with its worldwide customer base.

Visit the Sanborn Oblique page or Oblique Analyst page for more information about Sanborn Oblique imagery.
Sanborn UltraCam Eagles Are Soaring

Armed with three cutting-edge UltraCam Eagle cameras, Sanborn delivers record value to its customers.

A triple is one of baseball’s most exciting achievements, and so is mapping firm Sanborn’s recent triple. Sanborn beefed up its high-tech arsenal with three new UltraCam Eagle cameras, all purchased in one deal in early 2013. Management’s confidence the state-of-the-art technology would bolster the company’s product quality and productivity was well founded.

“We’ve successfully been flying the new Eagles nonstop,” says Sanborn CEO John Copple. “The cameras and the data have exceeded our expectations. The real beneficiaries of the new technology are our customers.”

UltraCam expert Craig Sweitzer, Sanborn’s data acquisition supervisor, can’t say enough about the Eagles. Sweitzer is one of North America’s veteran UltraCam operators, with more than 10 years of expertise.

“From an operator’s perspective, there’s a lot to like,” says Sweitzer. “They’re smaller and lighter than our previous cameras and take up less space in the aircraft. Fewer system components and the handy solid state data units make the mapping process more efficient from start to finish.”

To date, Sanborn’s Eagles have mapped more than 40,000 square miles, from Los Angeles and New York to the Mojave Desert, at 3-inch, 6-inch and 1-foot resolutions, and customers are buzzing about the data. Sanborn recently completed a water management project in southeast Colorado for Colorado Springs Utilities. Land Based Services Supervisor Eric White, PLS, was delighted with the data.

“We had strict requirements for this project, and Sanborn came though with flying colors,” says White. “The digital data was clean and crisp, even better than we expected. We wouldn’t hesitate to use Sanborn again.”

Sanborn Captures Imagery of Area Devastated by Waldo Canyon Fire

Image Showing Homes Burned By the Waldo Canyon Fire
The Waldo Canyon fire has impacted a number of individuals in Colorado Springs. Employees of Sanborn, an industry leader in mapping, have also been affected by the events that unfolded the week of June 24th 2012. As a member of the community, Sanborn staff felt called to action. Sanborn employees have responded with a service to the community to capture and process high quality mapping imagery and aerial photography over the burned areas. The imagery was acquired by Sanborn aircraft flying at 16,000 feet on June 28, 2012 over the Waldo Canyon fire. Employees have worked to implement the map data in a web viewer and as a web service that can be ingested into GIS desktop software to allow use of the data in any way needed to respond and recover from this epic event. ArcGIS Desktop users can download this layer file to view the June 28, 2012 imagery.

Click here to access the interactive Viewer

The imagery and aerial photography captured on June 28, 2012 and displayed in the web services is the property of Sanborn and should not be used for any commercial purpose without the express written consent of Sanborn per the terms and conditions of Sanborn’s standard End User License Agreement (EULA) 1. License Granted (a) I Demonstration License. Term of use of the Waldo Canyon Fire data under this EULA is for a period of 6 months. Contact information@sanborn.com or media@sanborn.com.

Special thanks is given to Colorado Springs Utilities and other members of the Pikes Peak Geospatial Alliance for providing access to the 2011 data which Sanborn is using for comparison purposes.