My third day at SEPI Engineering and Construction was spent with the Site/Civil Land Planning and Survey team. A surveyor is the first person on a construction site and the last person to leave one. Their job is to map out the land that is being scouted as a construction site and note very specific, detailed aspects of it. Examples include the dimensions of the site, the types of plants and animals in the area, the height/type of trees in the area, if there are any large objects or obstacles (such as large boulders, bodies of water, etc.), the type of soil in the area, and more. They also note and map any permanent structures on an in-progress construction site, such as sidewalks, storm drains, etc., and make sure that the construction is in line with city/town code. Today, we traveled to a middle school being constructed beside Apex Friendship Highschool. We set up a stationary tripod with a camera on top that shot a high-powered laser at a rod with a reflective mirror-prism. You stand at different locations around the construction site, carrying the prism rod mirror thing with you as you go. The laser from the camera reflects off of the prism and shoots back towards the camera, capturing a rough image of where you were standing with the rod. The camera has software which allows it to compile all of the pictures taken to form a digital map of the construction site. I also got to mess around with a $210,000 3d scanner that basically does the exact same thing that the laser-camera does, but in a much more efficient way. It has a laser pointer inside of it which spins at hundreds of rotations per minute, shooting lasers in every direction which bounce off of surfaces and come back to the camera. This process captures many pictures per second, and the scanner compiles the gigabytes of pictures into an almost exact 3d replica of the area around you. It basically does the same thing a 3d printer does, but in reverse. I got to mess around with several multi-thousand-dollar pieces of equipment today, and I didn’t break any of them, so that means that today was a success!
The 3d scanner