Time Names Leica BLK2FLY Scanner One of Top Inventions

Brief 

The Leica BLK2FLY, a laser scanner with autonomous flying that can be used to gather data for BIM, earned a nod on Time’s best inventions list for 2022. “With a few simple taps on a tablet, users can quickly and easily scan structures and environments accurately and entirely from the air,” said Hexagon, the parent company of Leica.

Insight

Leica’s BLK2FLY flying laser scanner is among the 200 devices to make Time Magazine’s annual best inventions list.
Other built environment-related devices to make the list include non-instrusive subsurface mapping, 3D-printed homes, automated 3D rendering and a digital tape measure.

At its launch last year, the Leica BLK2FLY was claimed as the world’s first fully integrated, autonomous flying laser scanning sensor. The combination of LiDAR, radar, cameras and GNSS ensures optimal and safe flight paths, Leica’s owner Hexagon claimed.

“With a few simple taps on a tablet, users can quickly and easily scan structures and environments accurately and entirely from the air. The airborne scanning provides value across multiple industries in need of accurate data of inaccessible or hard-to-reach areas (e.g. facade projections and rooftops), ensuring complete capture of a structure’s exterior features and dimensions,” Hexagon said.

Time noted of the Leica BLK2FLY: “But it’s for more than just the world of architecture, engineering, and construction [that benefits]: BLK2FLY, which went on sale in April, has been used to monitor structural safety across 160 acres of Italy’s Archaeological Park of Pompeii.”

Exodigo subsurface mapping latform

Exodigo was founded by “former Israeli army intelligence unit members,” Time noted. The group provides a non-intrusive platform that uses electromagnetic, radar, LiDAR, and other sensors to scan the ground to produce detailed 3D subsurface maps.

The California Department of Transportation has recently used the platform to identify utility lines for a project to a highway. The company is also carrying out pilot projects in Florida and Texas.