Example Use Case - 3D Point Cloud

3D Scanning: (*items are 3rd party available, not supplied by Navtech Radar)
By articulating a RAS 6 2D Radar it is possible to create a 3-dimensional point cloud. To demonstrate this a Navtech RAS 6 radar was attached to a servo-mechanism* and the following field trial was undertaken.
Apparatus required:
- Navtech RAS 6 Radar, configured for a forward facing FOV using sector blanking, Range limited to 200m, running at 4Hz 800 azimuth mode.
- Servo-mechanism^* with planetary gearbox and encoder - control achieved via ethernet communication^*.
- PC running Navtech SDK with interface to control electronics via ethernet^*.
- Application to rotate Radar and read data points utilising ‘Navigation mode’ which returns points above a pre-defined threshold. Returned points are converted to Cartesian co-ordinates and saved to a file.
Data rates / resolution:

Radar Mode (RAS 6)	Horizontal / Vertical Resolution	Max Scan rate (Deg. / second)

Radar Mode (RAS 6)	Horizontal / Vertical Resolution	Max Scan rate (Deg. / second)
4Hz, 800 Azimuth	0.45° / 0.45°	1.8° / second
4Hz, 800 Azimuth	0.45° / 0.9°	3.6° / second
8Hz, 400 Azimuth	0.9° / 0.45°	3.6° / second
8Hz, 400 Azimuth	0.9° / 0.9°	7.2° / second

Mechanism^* for rotating Navtech 2D RAS 6 Radar to create 3D point cloud

For this example, a section of a rock face in a Quarry was scanned using the Radar mounted on a static vehicle

Articulating Radar mounted to a static vehicle

The resulting point cloud file is then read into an application which is able to display the points in 3d space.

By generating Normals, it is possible to generate a mesh to represent the scanned object - in this case terrain from a Quarry.

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