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RIEGL, based in Austria, develops and supplies laser scanners for terrestrial, mobile, unmanned, airborne and industrial applications in surveying. It was founded by Dr. Johannes Riegl in 1978.

RIEGL´s headquarters are in Horn, a small town located in Lower Austria around 85km northwest from the Austrian capital, Vienna. Worldwide sales, training, support, and services are delivered from the Austrian headquarters and its offices in Vienna, Salzburg, and Styria, as well as by the international RIEGL main offices and a worldwide net of representatives.

There are several companies under the RIEGL Group umbrella which include (but not limited to): RIEGL Laser Measurement Systems GmbH, RIEGL RESEARCH Forschungsgesellschaft mbH, RiCOPTER UAV GmbH, RIEGL INTERNATIONAL GmbH, RIEGL USA Inc., RIEGL JAPAN Ltd., RIEGL (Beijing) Co., Ltd. and RIEGL Australia Pty Ltd.

Currently RIEGL employs more than 240 staff worldwide. The RIEGL headquarters in Horn comprises over 50,000 square feet of work space for research, development, production as well as for marketing, sales, training and administration and another 350,000 square feet of terrain for field testing.

While the international main offices are primarily active in distribution and direct customer service, RIEGL USA, based in Orlando Florida also has a technical support centre and an additional calibration field of 600,000 square feet.

History
The company was founded in the late 1970s starting with short-range impulse radar distance meters for industrial applications. The product range and thus also the application sectors expanded over the course of the first two decades with the introduction of laser rangefinders, pocket-size laser binoculars for semi-professional and recreational use besides distance sensors for industrial purposes and speed meters for traffic speed control. Except for the industrial distance meters which still represent an important market segment for RIEGL, these earlier product lines were closed when the main focus of the company shifted to the development of 2D and 3D laser scanners.

In 1996, the first RIEGL airborne laser scanner was introduced for corridor mapping.

RIEGL launched its first terrestrial 3D scanner for professional surveying applications in 1998.

In 2004, the company introduced the LMS-Q560, the worldwide first commercially available airborne laser scanner with high laser pulse repetition rates (PRR), digital signal processing and full-waveform analysis.

In 2008 and 2009, RIEGL presented the first online waveform processing 3D terrestrial laser scanner, the VZ-400 and the fully integrated VMX-250 mobile mapping system. The first airborne laser scanner for bathymetric applications was available in 2011.

Established in the professional surveying market, RIEGL paid further attention to the provision of fully integrated system solutions and in particular to the development of software for data acquisition, registration, synchronisation and post-processing.

In 2014, RIEGL delivered its first dual channel airborne LiDAR system for high performance topographic purposes, the LMS-Q1560, soon followed by a topo-bathymetric LiDAR system VQ-880-G.

In parallel to continuosly providing state-of-the-art solutions for the distinct application branches of industrial (ILS), static (terrestrial TLS), mobile (MLS), hydrographic (bathmetric BLS) and airborne laser scanning (ALS), RIEGL early recognized and acknowledged a new market potential in the small UAV surveying sector.

As a response to this fast evolving and highly dynamic market, RIEGL introduced the first survey-grade miniaturized laser scanner for integration on small UAS in 2014, and later the same year presented a turnkey solution with their own UAV “RiCOPTER”, an electrically powered octocopter as multi-sensor system carrying platform. The decision to gain a foothold in this young market soon opened up a new business segment with sensor systems for topo-bathymetric UAV-based laser scanning (ULS) and a dedicated subsidiary RiCOPTER UAV GmbH was founded in 2017.

3D Laser Scanning
Laser scanning is a method in the surveying and mapping industry to capture real world scenes. In contrast to conventional surveying methods, which provide discrete measuring points for selected targets, laser scanning devices capture the overall surface of an object with a very dense pattern of measuring points, which is called the point cloud. The denser the point cloud, the more elaborate the 3D scan of the object is. Multi-purpose laser scanners can be utilized in the means of surveying, such as agriculture and forestry, topography and urban environment mapping, alongside with construction-site monitoring and infrastructural developments.

The company´s laser scanners focus on pulsed time-of-flight laser radar technology in multiple wavelenghts. RIEGL´s core ´smart waveform´ technologies provide pure digital LiDAR (Light Detection and Radar) signal processing, unique methodologies for resolving range ambiguities, multiple targets per laser shots, optimum distribution of measurements, calibrated amplitudes and reflectance estimates.

RIEGL´s product portfolio covers five fields of 3D laser scanning applications currently: terrestrial, mobile, airborne, unmanned and industrial.