My company is leaning heavily toward purchasing one of the Rock robotic systems. We have narrowed our choose down between the R2A and a TrueView 410 from GeoQue.
I would like to hear from you guys on these pages that have more experience with this and other systems. Why did you choose a Rock Robotic system over other system you looked at or had.
The Rock system is very economical, but for us it is about getting a functional machine and easy to use software to help provide quality data for surveys and engineering designs. We have been out sourcing this work but want more quality control to keep all our services in house.
Hi Cory,
We were in the same boat as your company was in and choose Rock over the many other options. WE are very pleased so far. Harrison and his team are very knowledgeable and are happy to assist with any questions. We are flying the unit on the M300 with ease via the UGCS application. We are now in need of an affordable post classification software as the cloud is more of a visualizer/sharing tool, yes the marketplace can make deliverables but pricing is a lot when you are just in the testing phases and would like to make sure you are gathering the best data possible. It would be nice to be able to process sample data. Not sure on the GeoQue’s post software or tools you get on purchase but we did not see you have to have a business plan to add GCP’s this will be an added cost of around $2400 per year along with the added $3000 cost for the PCmaster this adds up. So be sure to weigh the yearly fees with the different licensing.
So overall if you want customer support when learning this new trade then the Rock team has helped us every step of the way. I don’t think the R2A could be any easier to operate as well as the software they provide to get your .las file. Now for post processing we are searching for these options.
The post processing was a concern for us as well. We have settled on Carlson Point cloud software. I think the post processing is an issue no matter what system you use. GeoQue is substantially more expensive but there system come with all the softwares do computers to process the data sets and training.
But I agree Harrison and his team has put a lot of R&D into these systems. Hard to argue with the results.
We were in the same boat as you and the r2A has been great. My concern has always been on the software side of things, and I have been pleased with both the desktop and cloud Rock Robotic software packages.
I do a good bit of post processing by manually combining field run shots and drone lidar points - you really have to keep all this in mind when doing pricing analysis. I include a processing fee in every quote I do - it is not hard to get an idea of what it will be. Also some of my projects take a day or two to process in the cloud, and I didn’t want to tie up a separate computer in my office for that long or longer to generate a file.
I have had great support from the Rock Robotic team and I’d much rather work out some bugs with a motivated company than have to deal with some of the other LiDAR setups. I did the same thing with DroneDeploy in 2016 and it was worth it.
Thanks for the kind words gentlemen! It’s a pleasure working with you guys to ensure you have not only the best, but also the easiest solutions for your individual needs. The back and forth of information exchange has been fantastic, and I think I speak for the whole team when I say that we are really excited for what the future may hold.