Ubi-T: Smart Surveying Instrument Using Ubiquitous Computing Concept

Over time, surveying instruments have evolved to the current stage of Total Stations that can measure various geometric aspects of different surveying operations with desired accuracies. Nowadays, they can measure distances, horizontal and vertical angles, store data into the computer memory, and display results automatically and perform robotically. In parallel with these traditional usages, location and positioning applications also appear in smartphones using the sensor- and infrastructure-based positioning techniques. The comparison between smartphones and Total Stations shows that, a Total Station even with high weight or usage complexity must be used depending on the application. However, due to the low cost, weight and small size of the smartphones, affordable effort to train operators and the role of modern technologies in the development of today’s phone, the term of Ubiquitous Total Station (Ubi-T) is presented. In this paper, the novel realization of Ubi-T is introduced and evaluated in different aspects to discuss, if there is a possibility to use a smartphones-based equipment instead of a Total Station. The system accuracy performance is compared with a Total Station during a field work experiment. While the accuracy of the laser ranging sensor reports from the data-sheet, the mean error of 0.700° and 5.401° in vertical and horizontal angle measurement is realized respectively. The fusion of all used smartphone sensors is realized with Kalman filtering (KF). The KF was implemented based on three main placements. First with attaching the smartphone on the test Total Station, second by mounting it on a tripod and finally by taking the smartphone in a freehand mode. At the end, discussion shows that the smartphone sensors can provide a variety of location-based services and applications.