Drones are fast becoming essential to public safety professionals who work with crash scene reconstruction. With an inexpensive entrance level in pricing, they provide fast capture on crash scenes and are superior when compared to older methods of data collection.
While there are limitations — for example, drones can’t be used for mapping at night, when many car crashes occur, or during adverse conditions, like wind, rain or snow — pairing a drone with a 3D laser scanner offers the best measurement capabilities of both tools. There are types of measurements that a 3D laser scanner can make that a drone can’t.
For example, a 3D laser scanner can map shiny vehicles, paint transfer and the area underneath vehicles. It can also map the insides of vehicles, which is essential if there’s been a fatality in the crash, as well as document blood stains and bullet holes if the vehicle has been involved in a shooting. In this way, 3D laser scanners are more precise at capturing crash scene data than drones.
But the two tools have their place and specific advantages. A drone can, of course, fly; and it can map a scene faster than a 3D laser scanner. That’s why ideally, a crash scene reconstructionist will have both drones and 3D laser scanners in their arsenal. They will use a 3D laser scanner for mapping the critical areas of a scene and a drone for quickly mapping the surrounding areas that require less detail.
And as more and more organizations are using both drones and 3D laser scanners in their crash reconstruction workflows, it has become critical to find photogrammetry software that can combine data from various sources.
That’s exactly what FARO® Zone 3D Pro and 3D Expert Software does. With FARO Zone, crash reconstructionists will find it easy to merge data sets from both drones and laser scanners. After loading both sets of data, all you have to do is pick the common points between the two, and the software will merge the data for you into one diagram.
Additionally, when you go in front of a jury, you want them to be blown away by the data you provide and the clarity of its presentation. That’s exactly what you get when you combine measurement data in FARO Zone. Once you’ve combined your drone and 3D laser scanner data, you can create compelling visuals for courtroom presentation, like 360-degree videos, virtual fly-throughs and animated scenes. There are many kinds of deliverables you can create, all of which present lifelike, accurate information that allows whoever is analyzing the report to do so from an informed, engaged standpoint.
A truly versatile scene reconstruction software, FARO Zone has an incredible number of capabilities. From the drone and laser scanner data it can combine to the quality of its reports and deliverables, the latest updates to Zone add over 50 new features and improvements — like the capability to import point cloud data in Zone 3D Pro and, for Zone 3D Expert, the ability to import photographs from any source and convert them to a point cloud, thus eliminating the need for third-party software.
With all there is to offer, why not try this 3D investigation software for yourself? Click here to download a trial that comes with a few different data sets so you can experience its capabilities in action.