Position measurement of piles using a laser range finder for accurate and efficient pile driving

In this research, we investigate a position measurement system for pile driving in construction foundation work using a laser range finder. Usually, in the pile driving process, pile positions are first marked using surveying instruments and piles are then driven at the measured positions. On the other hands, the proposed system measures a pile or piling machine and estimates the pile driving position directly in order to realize more accurate and efficient pile driving. In this paper, our laser range finder based surveying system is extended to a pile driving position measurement system. We present a method to detect circular part from laser range finder data in order to extract pile driving part from the scan data of the whole piling machine. We also test the feasibility of the proposed approach in a real construction field.