RSET was contacted to create a detailed 3D model of the Aircraft Rescue and Fire Fighting (ARFF) training facility at Blue Grass Airport (LEX) in Lexington, Kentucky. Our goal was to capture the facility and the interiors of its training simulators, and bring everything together into a single interactive RSET environment.

We also saw an opportunity to test something we’d been developing.

Meet the Turtle

We integrated our Leica BLK2GO mobile laser scanner onto an RSET-developed remote-controlled platform we call the Turtle. Instead of carrying the scanner through the facility ourselves, we sent the Turtle out to explore it while the BLK2GO collected point cloud data along the way.

The Turtle platform carrying RSET's Leica BLK2GO scanner
Image 2The Turtle platform carrying RSET’s Leica BLK2GO scanner

The results were excellent.

After capturing the larger facility, we moved on to some of the more challenging spaces. We scanned the interiors of the training simulators, storage container structures, and even the interior of a passenger aircraft.

From Documentation to Simulation

The individual models were then imported, positioned, and combined inside RSET, creating an interactive digital representation of the training environment.

Once the real-world facility exists inside RSET, the possibilities go well beyond documentation. The environment can become the foundation for training simulations, emergency response planning, scenario development, remote familiarization, and after-action review.

Combining robotics, LiDAR, reality capture, and simulation to document environments that may be difficult, dangerous, or time-consuming for people to capture manually.

The video below shows the resulting environment and simulator in action.