Real-Time GPS Land Surveying

Rick Grefsrud, Xinhua Qin, and William Martin

Abstract:	The art and science of land surveying incorporates many separated disciplines such as cadastral surveys, control surveys, stakeout surveys, boundary surveys and topographic surveys. Although today’s tool of choice for topographic surveys is the total station, the total station has limitations; line of site must be maintained between the measuring and reflecting devices. GPS is free of this constraint, but not without its own challenges. GPS surveying has traditionally been reserved for control surveys requiring significant post-processing. GPS surveying has evolved over the last twelve years from requiring point occupation times measured in hours to (more recently) minutes. Now centimeter level accuracy is available in the field, in real time. A real-time GPS surveying system has been developed with size, mobility and solution integrity made central to the design. The integrated system, capable of performing land surveys more accurately and with smaller field crews in shorter periods of time, has created opportunities for performing a variety of difficult field tasks. Applications such as topographic mapping, GIS data collection, mining stockpile inventory control, landfill volume computation, facilities management, and utilities inventory control can easily be performed. This paper addresses new possibilities that exist when high accuracy GPS results are delivered in real-time. Specific technology advances are discussed and the power and efficiency of this new technology as applied to land surveying applications are examined.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 1995 National Technical Meeting of The Institute of Navigation January 18 - 20, 1995 Disneyland Hotel Anaheim, CA
Pages:	287 - 292
Cite this article:	Grefsrud, Rick, Qin, Xinhua, Martin, William, "Real-Time GPS Land Surveying," Proceedings of the 1995 National Technical Meeting of The Institute of Navigation, Anaheim, CA, January 1995, pp. 287-292.
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