#29 - Kevin Andrews

Kevin Andrews is Director, Land Systems at Trimble Applanix in Toronto. He's been with the company for 26 years. In this episode, Kevin explains how the challenges for GNSS/IMU systems installed on land vehicles differ from those on airborne vehicles. He talks about the use of Trimble Applanix solutions on mobile mapping systems, rail vehicles, and construction equipment, covering the well-known POS LV, the lighter, smaller APX product line and the specialist POS TG and RT200. He describes three application areas in particular – precision agriculture, pipeline management and autonomous vehicles. The transition of Trimble Applanix products to a subscription basis and the continuing roll-out of the LVX+ solution bring the podcast to a close.

Phoenix LiDAR Systems was founded in 2013 and Grayson Omans is co-founder and CEO. In 2020, the company relocated from the Palms area of Los Angeles to Austin, Texas. In this episode, Grayson gives his reasons for making the move and assesses how successful it has proved, before describing the company's portfolio of hardware and software products. The evolving regulatory environment for UAVs has of course been a big influence on the company's direction over the years. It's interesting, however, that the company's products for crewed helicopters and aircraft, especially for wing-strut mounting, have led to considerable expansion in that market. Vehicle-mounted systems for mobile mapping have also been an area of considerable growth. The range of components that the company has successfully integrated is very broad, including not only different lidar sensors, but also RGB, hyper spectral and thermal infrared cameras, and the company has always tried to respond to customers' needs. 

Alex Brihac is Vice President, Head of Strategy and M&A at Hexagon Geosystems. He explains how his interest in engineering was imbued by his Romanian parents, resulting in his choices of undergraduate and graduate studies. His work for Turner Construction and McKinsey led to expertise in improving firms' performance as well as a deep interest in digital twins and how they should be created and used. He provides insights into the strategy development process at Hexagon and the way the company manages the acquisition process. He stresses technology – Hexagon spends more than 15% of annual revenue on R&D – and the tremendous importance of talking to customers. Finally, he briefly covers the Octave spin-off and some of the directions Hexagon will take in 2026 and beyond.

In this episode, Austin catches up with Raul Bravo, a prolific inventor holding more than 70 international patent families. As president and founder of Outsight, Raul explains how his firm's technologies transform streams of lidar data into real-time 3D spatial intelligence. The conversation delves into the analytical capabilities of dynamic 3D databases and explores the technical challenges of orchestrating thousands of laser scanners into a cohesive sensing system.

In this episode, Mach9's co-founder and CEO, Alex Baikovitz, talks enthusiastically about the company's mission to improve geospatial workflows for generating information from point clouds, making heavy but considered use of AI, plus innovations from the world of robotics. His flagship product, Digital Surveyor, outputs the derived features to familiar CAD and GIS software suites and can be deployed from a web browser. Alex claims speed improvements of 5x compared to more traditional software approaches – and much more dramatic numbers in certain circumstances. The company emerged from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, but is now located in downtown San Francisco, where the availability of a top-quality workforce and closeness to other well-known geospatial firms have proved beneficial.

Dr. Florent Poux is an award-winning researcher and adjunct professor in 3D Data Science at the University of Liège. Based in Toulouse, France, Florent operates the 3D Geodata Academy, a training resource dedicated to building innovations with 3D technology. In this episode, Austin gathers Dr. Poux's thoughts on how to employ novel data processing pipelines to extract value from 3D data. They also discuss his recently published book, 3D Data Science with Python, which seeks to help readers understand modern algorithms and spatial AI models, with a focus on hands-on learning and automation.

Dr. Helen Fricker is a Professor of Geophysics at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, one of the world's most important centers for global earth science research and education. Prior to her current role, Dr. Fricker was a science team member for NASA's Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat); she is currently the science team lead for ICESat-2, and Principle Investigator (PI) for NASA's Earth Dynamics Geodetic Explorer (EDGE) mission. In this episode, we pick Helen's brain about spaceborne lidar altimetry missions, some of the amazing science and research projects they support, and what's over the horizon from a development perspective.

Angus Pacala is CEO and co-founder of Ouster, a major lidar supplier based in San Francisco. The company made headlines in 2023 when it merged with arch-competitor Velodyne. Speaking from the company's offices in Edinburgh, Scotland (home of Sense Photonics, an Ouster acquisition in 2021), Angus addresses the company's technical developments and the status of its forthcoming L4 and Chronos solid-state components and their likely effect on the product portfolio. He explains how the company addresses the four verticals into which it has divided the market and where UAV-lidar fits in. Ouster's software portfolio is covered too. 

Dr. John Adler is a geographer and remote sensing professional with a diverse career in academia, government, and ecological research. He serves as the Lead Airborne Sensor Operator for the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) where he conducts airborne surveys across the nation during periods of peak vegetation greenness, contributing to large-scale ecological data collection efforts. In this episode, Austin chats with John about the ins-and-outs of collecting airborne lidar data in concert with RGB + hyperspectral sensors over NEON sites from Alaska to Puerto Rico. They close with a discussion of what the future may hold for NEON data collection and upload. 

In this episode, Stewart speaks with James Rush, Lidar Subject Matter Expert, Allen & Company, about his employer and his personal journey into lidar management. Allen & Company has roots in conventional land surveying, but its offerings today include extensive services in laser scanning of buildings, producing deliverables such as BIMs and digital twins. To this end, it has a subsidiary, Allen3D. James discusses some of the projects on which Allen is working and examines how the specifications are reached in discussion with clients, paying appropriate attention to published standards. He also describes an initiative at Tucker Ranch, near the company's headquarters in Winter Garden, Florida, in which he arranged for 17 collections of lidar point clouds of a small area, to provide a most unusual reference data set for many purposes.