Aerial LiDAR mounts the sensor on a manned aircraft or unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and surveys the terrain from above. As the aircraft flies over the project area, the LiDAR sensor sweeps the ground below — capturing millions of laser returns per second across a swath of terrain. Aerial LiDAR is the most powerful tool available for large-scale topographic survey. It covers hundreds of hectares per flight day, penetrates vegetation canopy to reveal the bare-earth surface beneath, and produces sub-meter Digital Terrain Models (DTMs) across areas that would be impractical to survey any other way. It is the survey method of choice for wind farm site assessment, solar farm feasibility, transmission line corridor surveys, flood mapping, watershed modeling, and any project where large-scale terrain data is required quickly and accurately.

Mobile LiDAR mounts the sensor on a moving vehicle — a car, truck, or rail platform — and captures the surrounding environment continuously as the vehicle travels. GPS, inertial measurement, and distance measurement systems combine to georeference every point captured during the drive. Mobile LiDAR is the most efficient method for surveying linear infrastructure at scale — road corridors, railway lines, utility networks, and urban streetscapes. A mobile LiDAR system can capture a complete road corridor — geometry, pavement, drainage structures, signage, and roadside assets — at driving speed, without lane closures or traffic disruption.

Terrestrial LiDAR positions the scanner on the ground — on a tripod or fixed mounting — and captures the surrounding environment from one or more scan positions. Each scan position produces a dense, millimeter-accurate 3D point cloud of everything visible from that location. Multiple scan positions are registered together to produce a complete model of the structure or environment. Terrestrial LiDAR excels where detail and accuracy at close range are paramount — as-built documentation of buildings and infrastructure, heritage recording of historic structures and monuments, structural deformation monitoring, and confined-space surveys where aerial methods cannot operate. Unlike aerial LiDAR which looks down, terrestrial LiDAR looks outward — capturing vertical surfaces, architectural detail, and structural geometry with a level of precision and completeness that no other survey method can match.

Bathymetric LiDAR uses a specialized green-wavelength laser that penetrates the water surface and reflects from the seabed or riverbed below — unlike conventional LiDAR lasers which reflect from the water surface. This allows Aerial Bathymetric LiDAR to survey shallow to moderate-depth water environments from an aircraft in the same way that aerial topographic LiDAR surveys the land. The result is a seamless, integrated survey of the land surface and the underwater terrain in a single pass — a capability that is uniquely valuable for coastal zone management, offshore wind farm assessment, hydrological modeling, and nearshore infrastructure projects where the land-water boundary is critical. For deeper water or areas requiring higher underwater resolution, Multibeam Echosounder (MBES) hydrographic survey provides complementary capability — using acoustic rather than light-based measurement to map the seabed in detail.