No More Nodding
The most obvious update is that the ZEB-REVO doesn’t require you to “nod” the sensor back and forth like the ZEB-1. Instead, it rotates the scanning head automatically.
As GeoSLAM COO Mark Reid explained to SPAR, this is more important than you might think. When the user is required to nod the device, he says, “what that means is that the user can nod it too fast, and affect the quality of the data. The data that you see, and the structure of the point cloud depends upon where and how the user is nodding the device. With the ZEB-REVO, because it automatically rotates on the motor at a standard speed, there’s much less room for user error.”
In turn, this makes the scanner more versatile in implementation. Since the head turns on its own, it can be mounted on a UAV, a cart, a backpack—even a stick or a zip line. Reid tells me that you can start a scan by hand, strap the device to a backpack part of the way through, then move it to a stick, and so on, without ever interrupting the scan process. “There are a huge number of new applications.”