With 2024 mostly behind us, we can now look at what 2025 may bring. 2024 was an amazing year with growth in every department, but now that 2025 is here, what does it look like? Let’s first look at the equipment we added in the closing quarter of the year. We purchased a Leica AT-600 laser tracker that measures and scans, so now we can precisely measure elevated objects without putting our metrologists in lifts, thereby increasing efficiency and safety. We added the Ping DSP shallow water multi-beam / side-scan sonar system. This system will allow us to collect multi-beam and side-scan simultaneously. This system collects multi-beam swath data at 12 times the water depth. So, we will collect a wider swath and not have to run a second mission for side scan collection. The wider swath and simultaneous collection will increase efficiency enormously while simultaneously reducing our field personnel’s time on the water. Our last and biggest purchase of the year is the Leica Chiroptera 5 topographic/bathymetric LiDAR sensor for our fixed-wing aircraft. This sensor will allow us to collect bathymetric and topographic data simultaneously. This sensor, combined with our hydrographic and land surveying departments, will increase productivity exponentially. SurvTech collects bathymetric and topographic data on numerous projects every year, and now we have an airplane sensor that can add to that mission. Once again, this increases efficiency and reduces the time our field personnel must spend in the field, which also increases safety. So, we will see a continuation of technology increasingly replacing manual labor in the mapping world. Data will be collected quickly and with more accuracy and detail.
Over the last 4-8 years, SurvTech has constantly transitioned from a standard land surveying firm to a geospatial firm. With this transition, our staff has grown with us in size, but also with increased opportunity. We see the same continuing. Land surveying shall always be a core service at SurvTech, but other departments will grow and complement land surveying. As more and more of the world becomes digital, we will transition from mapping the land to mapping underwater, underground, and inside buildings. We will see static mapping from tripods surpassed by kinematic mapping from moving vehicles, including airplanes, helicopters, UAVs, ATVs, boats, USVs, and people. SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) and inertial technology will advance and become more and more important to precision positioning. Non-traditional mapping will occur in GPS-denied environments, such as buildings, caves, under bridges, and other structures. SLAM will become more commonplace on autonomous vehicles, whether they are aerial or ground traversing. Only time will tell. With the advances in robust data collection, we will see larger and larger datasets, including imagery, LiDAR, multi-beam, or even geophysics. The IT backbone of SurvTech will have to grow and adapt to continually handle the ever-changing data requirements. Increased office manhours will replace the reduced field manhours due to the need for extensive data management, processing, drafting, and delivery methods.
You will begin to see AI (Artificial Intelligence) start to replace processing manhours and automated workflows. Workforces will transition from people doing hours of tedious processing to those who can work with AI and empower it. Workflows will automate from the field to the office to the delivery process. In 1965, one of the owners of Intel (Gordon Moore) stated that processing power doubled in approximately two years. In recent years, processing growth has slowed due to technical challenges, but Google released a new chip called “Willow” in the last few weeks. The “Willow” chip is not just a little faster but exponentially faster. The claim is that it executed a complete computation in under five minutes, and the next closest computer would have taken 10 septillion years. If you don’t
know what “Septillion” is, it’s a 1 followed by 24 zeros. The earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old, and a billion is a 1, followed by 9 zeros. So, we can’t even comprehend how incredibly fast the Willow chip truly is. So, with the advancement in processing speed, what’s next? Processing speed needs to be followed by data storage capacity and write speeds, and it is. Currently, there is High Bandwidth Memory (HBM3E) storage that boasts speeds of 8 Gbps (gigabits per second), which is about 125 Mbps (megabytes per second). Geospatial firms must embrace these advances. Maybe we won’t be working with the “Willow” chip this decade, but we will be working with faster and faster processors over the next decade. Information Technology (IT) was an afterthought for many geospatial and traditional land surveying firms in years past, but now it’s at the forefront of the geospatial workflow. Not only is speed and storage of the geospatial dataset important, but protecting it from adversaries and bad actors is now paramount. CMMC (Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification) has now become law, and you will see government agencies, utilities, and large commercial companies adopting it as a requirement for their work. AI will help us protect our data as much as it will help bad actors going after data, so everything will balance out once again unless you never transitioned to working with AI.
Wow, the advancements in the geospatial realm will become more incredible year after year. In 2025, we will be on the doorstep of the advanced world of digital twins and virtual reality datasets. SurvTech will continue to embrace these technological advancements, adding equipment and software and training our people to utilize them fully. 2025 won’t come without challenges, but it will also come with the opportunity to embrace new technology and workflows. These opportunities will benefit SurvTech, but more importantly, they will benefit our clients and our personnel. In every project, we will have numerous methods to collect data on land, underwater, underground, underground beneath a water body, and inside buildings, caves, and tunnels. Combining these datasets into a seamless 3D model of the project will be the key to our success! 2025 will be a great year for all of us, but it is even greater for those who joined the surveying and photogrammetry industries when measurements were being performed with steel tape or black-and-white photographs from film. We’ve seen huge advancements in the past 20 years, and 2025 will be no different!
As 2025 proceeds, look for monthly announcements on social media and in our newsletter. We look forward to utilizing our latest technology acquisitions on projects and developing innovative delivery techniques for viewing and working with geospatial data. We wish our employees, clients, and vendors a healthy, productive, and joyful year—another year when technology will grow exponentially, making it fun to be in the geospatial industry!