The Future of Surveying and Mapping: How Allen & Company is Embracing the Geospatial Services Era
Allen & Company is a surveying, mapping, and geospatial services firm with over three decades of experience delivering value to our customers across the Central Florida area—and beyond.
Surveying and mapping have been vital tools for understanding the Earth’s physical features and gathering essential information for various industries—primarily construction companies, but also for commercial Real Estate and industrial or infrastructure development. Traditionally, these practices involved manual measurements and fieldwork, which are known to be time-consuming and require significant human effort, specialized training, and even manual calculations. And while all of these skills are still needed, the evolutionary process has opened our future to new and exciting opportunities beyond construction and development.
With the advent of advanced technologies for surveying and mapping, firms like Allen & Company have evolved into the geospatial services industry as the former professional trade transitioned into a specialized technologist competency. This transformation has revolutionized how we gather, analyze, and utilize geospatial data as licensed professional surveyors and mappers. Building on years of experience of our traditional surveying and mapping methods, Allen & Company has been training and developing our teams to serve our clients with advanced technologies—and we have invested in the tools and devices that can accurately map, survey, and report with more accuracy than ever before.
How Geospatial Technologies Drive Innovation
One of the most significant drivers of Allen & Company’s geospatial services evolution involved the adoption of emerging geospatial technologies. Cutting-edge tools such as Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), Geographic Information Systems (GIS), LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) and UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) are revolutionizing data acquisition and processing. Here is a primer on how Allen & Company is using these advanced technologies:
- GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite Systems): GNSS provides real-time positioning information with high accuracy, allowing surveyors to precisely locate points on the Earth’s surface. This technology has found applications in agriculture, construction, disaster management, and urban planning, and many more applications for accurate measurement of points on land. GNSS is part of many of the tools and technology resources in use by Allen & Company—allowing our teams to identify and locate the position of land across our surveying and mapping projects.
- GIS (Geographic Information Systems): GIS enables the visualization, analysis, and interpretation of spatial data, empowering decision-makers with valuable insight that uses satellite positioning. Given its accuracy and accessibility, GIS has become an indispensable technology platform across various industries—but most importantly, it is now a staple of forward-thinking surveying and mapping firms like Allen & Company.
- LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging): LiDAR technology, when combined with aerial and terrestrial platforms used in the surveying and mapping industry, can produce high-resolution 3D maps of the environment. This data is crucial for urban planning, infrastructure development, forestry, and environmental monitoring—or in Allen & Company’s case, it delivers rich data for large commercial, industrial, infrastructure, and residential development projects. Allen & Company employs a variety of LiDAR devices, from vehicle or UAV-mounted for scanning large facilities to handheld scanners that can be used indoors or in tight spaces.
- UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles): UAVs are commonly known as drones, and they have dramatically changed the surveying and mapping profession with fast and effective capabilities when coupled with payload attachments for photogrammetry or LiDAR. Allen & Company uses drones to survey and map large areas—from tracts of land to be developed to existing infrastructure such as highways or airports. If the weather conditions are favorable to fly a mission, our UAV fleet can capture high-resolution imagery and LiDAR data, making these drones a formidable tool for cost-effective data collection.
Allen & Company’s multi-competency approach to surveying, mapping, and geospatial projects allows us to serve the needs of customers across multiple industries and markets. We actively work with enterprise-level clients with large or multiple projects requiring a variety of solutions within our geospatial spectrum, allowing us to consult prior to the proposal stage to ensure they are procuring exactly what they need. In many cases, our geospatial and advanced technology solutions can find ways to save them time and effort—leading to successful outcomes and satisfied customers.
