The Geotech Monitoring Station (GMS) replaces traditional total stations that rely on mirrored prisms to be attached to the slope. The system can scan these points, but can also reflect its signal directly off the rock without the need for prisms; reducing the need for a dangerous industry practice.
Lachlan Campbell, VP of marketing and technology at GroundProbe, said: "Prisms can be dangerous to install, inflexible to changing ground conditions and their repair or replacement can be unsafe, time-consuming and expensive."
The GMS is able to achieve excellent ‘virtual point' precision by applying GroundProbe's patented radar signal and data processing techniques to the long-range laser.
John Beevers, CEO of GroundProbe, noted: "With capabilities well beyond that of typical robotic total stations, the GMS is a complete-end-to-end intelligent monitoring solution with smart data capture, processing and analysis. The GMS, and the prisms and points it monitors, complements our Slope Stability Radar suite to provide a complete monitoring strategy for our customers, allowing them to better manage risk, increase productivity, and ensure maximum safety."
As an Electronic Distance Measurement (EDM) LiDAR, the GMS monitors through automatically measuring hundreds or up to a thousand discrete points on a wall, in the form of physical and virtual prisms.
Fernanda Carrera, product manager at GroundProbe, explained: "Like all of our products, it's not just a piece of hardware, but a comprehensive, complete monitoring system. The GMS monitors vast mine areas for long periods of time of many months to many years. It specialises in background monitoring in open cut pits and highly vegetated slopes, as well as detecting and measuring small-scale movement, on tailings dams, dumps and cuttings, that precede a collapse."
The GMS joins GroundProbe's ever-growing suite of products as a long-term, background monitoring tool.
Carrea commented: "Our patent-pending visualisation technique that co-locates data with the ultra-high definition images captured by the GMS's dual cameras is a step change in data visualisation for prism monitoring. Automatically visualising data and heat maps on high-resolution photos, or in 3D, sets the GMS apart from existing solutions, which often force users to view data in a table rather than more intuitive visualisations.
"The GMS's integration with GroundProbe's SSR-Viewer software solves these shortcomings."
The dual camera imaging capabilities of the GMS, wide-angle and telescopic, permits users to precisely see and control the locations of points in real-time while providing the ability to conduct remote visual inspection.
