NZ firm acquires rights to map tool

Wellington-based technology company Surveylab, which last year attracted $2 million from venture capital company No. 8 Ventures, has licensed American military technology which merges a handheld computer with global positioning capability.

Set up three years ago by engineer Leon Toorenburg and businessman Rex Nicholls to make "Ike" - a handheld recorder for use by the military - Surveylab has bought rights to a sophisticated device created by the US Army Construction Engineering Research Lab in Champaign, Illinois.

The Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette says the hand-held apparatus for mobile mapping and expedited reporting - or HAMMER - can be used to assess and record damage to infrastructure like roads, bridges, sewers and dams.

The hand-held iPaq computer has GPS capability, a digital camera, compass, laser distance meter, inclinometer (to measure slope) and geographic information system or GIS mapping software.

The information collected with the device can easily be incorporated in a database, tied to a map, and turned into a report. It has two kinds of wireless capability, plus wired connections so its contents can be moved into a laptop, or sent to a portable printer, other HAMMERS, or the internet.

"Things that used to take you days or weeks to generate a report are now done at the end of the day with the push of a button," said CERL researcher Tad Britt, who used one in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

Some of the devices are being used in Iraq and Afghanistan to lay out Army camps and record environmental conditions to assess damage and liability from US operations, but they could also be used on the battlefield for surveying troop movement and supply routes or minefields.

Britt, an archaeologist, has also used it in that field. He said there was a civilian market for the system in real estate management, civil engineering and surveying. It could also be used for "homeland security", say, to study access points at facilities like airports.

CERL started developing the system to map archaeological data at military construction sites and found that Surveylab, with eight staff, had done something similar with its Ike (I Know Everything) device which takes photographs and simultaneously labels them with a GPS position so that they can be downloaded on to a GIS map.

Surveylab has sold Ikes for use in Canada, US, Iraq, Afghanistan, South Africa, Europe, Asia, India, and Australia, as well as NZ, and is negotiating a major sale to the NZ Defence Force.

Company chief executive Andy Nicoll said it was setting up a sales operation in the US.

- NZPA