Project Red Lake open data: 3D bathymetric chart

Hi all,

it has been a long time without post here in ATOR, but this year we had to work on several different projects, without the possibility to report fast feedback in our blog.

I start today to write again, due to the fact that some of these projects grab the attention of different institutions of the academic world and, in particular, this happened for our underwater archaeology missions. 

Of course our primary interest during our diving is related with the archaeological perspective, but often the data we collect can be useful for other specialists (e.g. limnologists or biologists).

This is the reason why we decided to share our data and we start today with the bathymetric chart of Lake Tovel (previous post in ATRO: 1, 2). I processed this map working on the Red Lake Project, a research, directed by Prof. +Tiziano Camagna, which tries to study the medieval submerged forest of Lake Tovel (Trentino - Italy). I produces a 3D model of the bathymetric chart of this lake directly digitizing the map of Edgardo Baldi did in the '30s. Than I calibrated the result with the LIDAR model of the landscape, freely accessible form the geographic open data portal of the Autonomous Province of Trento (here a short tutorial about how to download data from the webgis).

Here is possible to download the file (an ESRI ASCII grid), ready to be integrated in most of the GIS software (below a screenshot of the data in GRASS GIS).

Tovel Lake bathymetrci chart in GRASS GIS

The data are available under the following license:

Lake Tovel 3D bathymetric chart by Arc-Team is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

I hope this data will be useful. Have a nice day!

ROS and professional archaeology

It is a long time since we wrote something in this blog, but (like every year) the excavation season leaves us few time for research. For this reason, today I want to break our silence and show some results of our latest studies regarding archeorobotics (the use and development of robotic devices in archaeology).

If you are a regular reader of ATOR, you probably know that since 2012 we are working on optical sensor to achieve a real-time 3D documentation of archaeological evidences (or any kind of data we need to acquire during our projects). Since we started to work on different kind of drones (UAV, ROV, etc...), we discover the nice universe of ROS (Robot Operating System) and SLAM (Simultaneous Localization And Mapping) algorithms. In this post we summarized our research on this topic, focusing on the use of Kinect. Currently we already used this techniques on professional projects (like large scale surveys or excavations), adapting the system to work with RGB-D devices (in underground environment or during cloudy days) or stereocameras (with direct sun light conditions). For instance we helped our friend Cristian Boscaro of IUAV to test this technology in order to document the tunnels which connect the domes of the Abbay of S. Giustina in Padua. This evening I will post a video which shows a particular use of ROS and Kinect to solve a technical problem we had on the field today. We were working to assist the excavator in doing a trench for a pipeline near the Sanctuary of S. Romedio, in difficult logistic condition. Despite the absence of archaeological evidences, the Superintendence asked us to document the track of the trench, since often what is realize during the execution of this kind of work is different from what is planned in the map. Due to the fact that too few hours were left to accomplish a documentation with GPS and total station and that this strategy would have been pretty tricky (inside the gorge of the river S. Romedio) and not so accurate (for the scattering effect of the wood), we decided to use SLAM to get a real time 3D documentation of the track and later to georeference the result on the LIDAR data which the Autonomous Province of Trento releases freely. The video below shows the final result, which completely satisfies the (high) archaeological tolerance of this project.

That's all for today! Have a nice evening!

Fusion + Quantum GIS: an Open Source approach for managing LIDAR data

As I was recently asked by some students here at Lund university to provide them with some "alternative" solution (compared to the ArcGIS-based workflow) to import LIDAR data in GIS, I ran into this software package named Fusion (http://forsys.cfr.washington.edu/fusion/fusionlatest.html). It has been developed by a branch of the US Forest Service to manage and analyze LIDAR data. Basically, by using Fusion, users are enabled to convert .las binary data format into a .txt file. Then, the data can be imported in QGIS and filtered based on the classification codes associated to the file itself. Here you can find a short video-tutorial which can help you in understanding the whole data-processing workflow (p.s. please ignore the MS Windows background! :-) ).