XGRIDS Lixel Kity K1 Workflow

This video will give a quick overview of the workflow to collect and process a cm accurate SLAM LiDAR point cloud with the XGRIDS Lixel Kity K1 terrestrial scanner. The K1 is ideal for complex, dynamic, or hard-to-access environments requiring fast data collection and 3D modeling. In addition to the Lixel software, you can export the processed point cloud in LAS or PLY formats for use in data extrapolation programs like PIX4Dsurvey. 

In this video we demonstrate the workflow and some of the capabilities of the XGRIDS Lixel K1. We can operate the K1 with just the button or connect our phone for a graphical user interface. We can connect either using our mobile hot spot or a cable. Since we’ve connected to this K1 in the past plugging in the cable will establish the connection automatically. If that’s not the case, tapping the plus button and following the prompts will get us connected. From the main menu we can look at what projects we have in storage, enable USB Mode for transferring files to a computer, or go into our Settings to adjust our Display mode, or connect to our RTK service, and other settings. Tapping Go will take us to the collection screen.  

The record button will then ask us to define the type of project we are collecting before starting the static initialization. After the 15 second static initialization, we can walk around and monitor our scan in real time. Once we’ve collected our data, we can clean up the raw point cloud with the included Lixel Studio software. Let’s transfer the project file from our microSD card first. Then open and create a project in Lixel Studio. I'll create a new project folder to make it easy to find our exports and once the project is open, we can import our LAS and take a first look at our raw point cloud.  

Here we have a considerable amount of noise in our collection, as well as some artifacting from a piece of my body in the scan path showing everywhere the scanner went. The good news is Lixel Studio should be able to clean this up. Project processing will do a lot of the heavy lifting here. We’ll confirm the file path for the project folder. We then have several options to improve or fine tune our processed point cloud. And finally, we will designate the file path for the processed point cloud. Once the status bar turns solid it means our processing has finished. Let’s import those results. 

Now that most of the noise is gone, I’ll clip out the excess to focus on what I care about and condense the file size. The point cloud is a little more manageable so we can run some more processing for Denoising, Smoothing, or resampling. We can also make additional cuts based on what we want the final LAS to look like. We can export this LAS for further data extrapolation with software like Pix4Dsurvey or your preferred point cloud software.  

We can also natively use this project in Lixel CyberColor to view it as a model and take measurements or annotations as demonstrated in our LCC overview. Take a look at the data set presented in this video for yourself in the Lixel CyberColor web app.