Frame A-09 · White paper

Mobile Mapping Systems: A Buyer's Guide

Publisher: 3D Laser Mapping Ltd
Year: 2016
Topic: Technology
Published here: 15 August 2026

Audio briefing · A-09

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A mobile mapping buyer's guide, credited to an author named Cox and dated 2016, once circulated from a British company called 3D Laser Mapping.

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A mobile mapping buyer's guide, credited to an author named Cox and dated 2016, once circulated from a British company called 3D Laser Mapping. Finding the guide itself today is not possible. The company's own website no longer serves its own content, and no working copy of the specific document turned up in this research. What can be said with confidence is the story of the company and the product line the guide was almost certainly written to sell. 3D Laser Mapping, based in Bingham, near Nottingham in the UK, built its reputation on a system called StreetMapper, which it describes as the first commercially available mobile mapping system on the market, launched in 2005. StreetMapper mounted laser scanners and a GPS and inertial navigation unit onto a road vehicle, letting surveyors capture highway data by simply driving past it, without the traffic management that manual surveying usually requires. By 2016, the company had moved on to a more flexible product called ROBIN. The idea behind ROBIN was that one core piece of hardware could be reconfigured three ways: strapped to a backpack for walking surveys, mounted in a vehicle for driving surveys, or fitted to a drone or helicopter for aerial surveys. The backpack configuration weighed just under nine kilograms. The system carried two GNSS antennas, a survey-grade inertial navigation unit, and cameras with either twelve or eighteen megapixels depending on the mode, covering a wide three hundred thirty degree field of view. Graham Hunter, the company's executive chairman at the time, called it the first three in one system on the market, aimed at customers who wanted flexibility without buying three separate pieces of hardware. A genuine buyer's guide for this category would typically walk through point cloud density, navigation accuracy, sensor field of view, mounting flexibility and post-processing software, the standard criteria the industry uses to compare mobile mapping systems against each other. None of that is 3D Laser Mapping today. The company was absorbed into a firm called GeoSLAM, itself acquired by the American measurement company FARO Technologies in September 2022. Attempting to load the original company's website now returns a security certificate for FARO instead. The mobile mapping hardware lineage continues at FARO under new names, but the guide this guide no longer exists as a reachable document, and the company that wrote it no longer exists as an independent brand.

Finding the exact text of this buyer’s guide was not possible in the course of this research, and that fact is itself the most honest place to start. A document titled “Mobile Mapping System: A Buyer’s Guide,” credited to an author named Cox and dated 2016, is referenced in the bibliography of at least one academic paper on mobile mapping technology. The company behind it, 3D Laser Mapping, no longer runs its own website; attempting to reach it today returns a security certificate belonging to FARO Technologies, the American measurement company that eventually absorbed the business. What follows describes the company and the product this guide was written around, using facts that could be independently verified rather than the guide’s own unreachable text.

The company that wrote it

3D Laser Mapping was a UK-based mobile and terrestrial LiDAR scanning company headquartered in Bingham, near Nottingham. By 2016, the year this buyer’s guide appears to date from, its flagship product was ROBIN, a flexible successor built around a single idea: one core hardware unit that could be reconfigured for three very different survey jobs. Whoever wrote the guide was, in all likelihood, writing to sell that specific machine.

StreetMapper, 2005

ROBIN did not appear out of nowhere. The company’s first major product, StreetMapper, is described by the company as the first commercially available mobile mapping system on the market when it launched in 2005, eleven years before this guide. StreetMapper worked by mounting laser scanners alongside a GPS and inertial navigation unit onto a road vehicle, letting a survey team capture a highway’s geometry simply by driving along it: no lane closures, no manual measurement crew standing in traffic. That vehicle-only design is the main thing ROBIN improved on a decade later, by making the hardware detachable from any single mounting type.

One system, three ways to carry it

ROBIN could be strapped into a backpack for a surveyor walking a site, mounted inside a vehicle for a driving survey, or fitted to a drone or helicopter for an aerial pass, switching between configurations reportedly took five to ten minutes. The backpack setup weighed just under nine kilograms. Across all three modes the system carried two GNSS antennas, a GIS-grade inertial navigation unit, a touchscreen control unit, and a camera that shot at twelve megapixels in vehicle mode or eighteen megapixels in walking and flying mode, covering a three hundred thirty degree field of view. Graham Hunter, the company’s executive chairman, described it at launch as “the first on the market to offer a three-in-one system,” aimed at customers who wanted flexibility without buying and maintaining three separate scanning rigs.

A genuine buyer’s guide for this product category would typically walk a customer through the criteria that actually distinguish one mobile mapping system from another: point-cloud density and accuracy, the quality of the GNSS and inertial navigation, sensor field of view, how easily the hardware moves between mounting types, and the post-processing software that turns raw scan data into a usable map. Whether the 2016 Cox guide covered exactly these points cannot be confirmed without the original text.

What happened to the company

If you are trying to place this document in a product catalogue today, the honest answer is that the catalogue itself has changed owners twice since the guide was written. 3D Laser Mapping does not exist today as an independent business. It was absorbed into GeoSLAM, a firm that continued developing handheld and vehicle-based mobile-mapping hardware under its own brand, and GeoSLAM was in turn acquired by FARO Technologies in September 2022. FARO’s current mobile-mapping hardware lineage, including the FARO Orbis mobile laser scanner, is the direct commercial descendant of the StreetMapper-to-ROBIN product line this buyer’s guide was almost certainly written to sell. The guide itself has not survived online in a form this research could locate; the company that published it has not survived as an independent brand either.