Standard artifact for the geometric verification of terrestrial laser scanning systems

Terrestrial laser scanners are geodetic instruments with applications in areas such as architecture, civil engineering or environment. Although it is common to receive the technical specifications of the systems from their manufacturers, there are not any solutions for data verification in the market available for the users. This work proposes a standard artifact and a methodology to perform, in a simple way, the metrology verification of laser scanners.The artifact is manufactured using aluminium and delrin, materials that make the artifact robust and portable. The system consists of a set of five spheres situated at equal distances to one another, and a set of seven cubes of different sizes. A coordinate measuring machine with sub-millimetre precision is used for calibration purposes under controlled environmental conditions. After its calibration, the artifact can be used for the verification of metrology specifications given by manufacturers of laser scanners.The elements of the artifact are destinated to test different metrological characteristics, such as accuracy, precision and resolution. The distance between centres of the spheres is used to obtain the accuracy data, the standard deviation of the top face of the largest cube is used to establish the precision (repeatability) and the error in the measurement of the cubes provides the resolution value in axes X, Y and Z. Methodology for the evaluation is mainly supported by least squares fitting algorithms developed using Matlab programming.The artifact and methodology proposed were tested using a terrestrial laser scanner Riegl LMSZ-390i at three different ranges (10, 30 and 50 m) and four stepwidths (0.002°, 0.005°, 0.010° and 0.020°), both for horizontal and vertical displacements. Results obtained are in agreement with the accuracy and precision data given by the manufacturer, 6 and 4 mm, respectively. On the other hand, important influences between resolution and range and between resolution and stepwidth are observed. For example, the two smaller cubes cannot be well detected in any case and, as must be expected, the increase in range and stepwidth produces a decrease in the quality of the detection for the larger ones.