#16 – Steven Woolven

#16 – Steven Woolven

March 5th, 2025

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Announcer: Welcome to the LIDAR Magazine Podcast, bringing measurement, positioning and imaging technologies to light. This event was made possible thanks to the generous support of rapidlasso, producer of the LAStools software suite.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Welcome to LIDAR magazine and the LIDAR magazine podcast. My name is Stewart Walker and I am the managing editor of LIDAR magazine. My guest today is Dr. Steven Woolven, president of Trimble Applanix. Steve, we’re delighted to have you on board, and it’s a great pleasure to be talking to you again. Thank you for finding time to talk to us.

Steven Woolven: Thank you Stewart. Very happy to be here, and I’m looking forward to our discussion this afternoon.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Now Steve, I think all our listeners know Trimble Applanix. You’re a huge name in the lidar world. I’ll just give a couple of sentences to set the scene for any listeners who are not so familiar. I think suffice it to quote your website that explains the Applanix was founded on defense and aerospace industry expertise. It’s been a part of Trimble since 2003. Applanix position and orientation systems POS have become the world’s industry standard for airborne land, marine and indoor mobile survey operations.

And Trimble Applanix is headquartered in Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada on the Northern outskirts of Toronto. So, with that short introduction, we can go into the many discussion points I’ve jotted down for today’s conversation. Now Steve, as you know from – you said you had listened to a couple of the podcasts, I sometimes include a little history, partly to provide a perspective and partly to jog the memories of listeners who have been in the geospatial world for a long time. Applanix was founded in February 1991 as Applied Analytics Corporation, a spin-off of Honeywell’s Advanced Technology Center by Dr. Blake Reid and two others. Is that correct? And maybe you could tell us a little bit about these gentlemen and what they’re doing now.

Steven Woolven: That is correct. So that predates my involvement at Applanix or Applied Analytics at the time. Honeywell had an Advanced Technology Center here in Canada in Ontario working on mostly defense type applications. And late ‘80s Honeywell made the decision to get out of the defense business in Canada. And so they tried to sell the business, were unsuccessful at the time. And so ultimately the three founders of Applanix, Dr. Blake Reid, Dr. Bruno Scherzinger and Eric Lithopolous made a pitch to Honeywell to take over the business, take over the contracts that Honeywell was committed to. With the purpose ultimately to use that technology in the commercial space, which is where they ultimately wanted to go.

So Blake and Bruno are retired. Bruno retiring a little more than a year ago now. Was our Chief Technology Officer for a long, long time. Blake was the original president of Applanix Applied Analytics, and I took over for him in 2005. And Eric, who was our visionary business development guru I guess you’d call him, unfortunately passed away at a young age. That was quite a shock to everybody in the organization in the geomatics world.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Yes indeed. That’s sad. Say a little bit about how the company developed from that start then. What did you do in the early years?

Steven Woolven: So initially when the company was formed we had a number of contracts with the Canadian Defence Department, a little bit in the US. And so we had to finish those contracts out. They were all around positioning technologies, positioning and orientation technologies for tow bodies for helicopter navigation systems. And so those contracts needed to be properly finished. But the intent, as I said, was to take that technology into the commercial space. Not the consumer space but the commercial space. So initially in the early days the company was funded by contracts, mostly in defense applications. And in 1992 we made the decision officially that we were going to get into the commercial space.

And so the technologies that had been developed for these defense applications we went looking for a customer where we could use that technology in what we now know as a mobile mapping application. Back in those days that wasn’t what it was called. But in July of ’93 we had our very first customer, a company called Roadware, a company that was subsequently acquired by Fugro, placed an order for the very first POS LV system. And that allowed us to take the defense technology and create our first commercial spin-off of it.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Nineteen ninety-three.

Steven Woolven: Nineteen ninety-three, yes.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Okay, well, jumping forward just a little. I became familiar with Applanix in the late ‘90s. I was part of a team developing the Leica ADS-40, the first airborne digital camera to be introduced to the market with the goal of superceding the film camera. And as far as I can remember it wasn’t very difficult to select Applanix as the source of the – I guess at that time we called it GPS rather than GNSS. But anyway, the GPS and IMU hardware and software. So those high end systems were obviously a big part of your business then. And I also remember that there were very tight US export laws governing what you could do and what you couldn’t do with an IMU.

So that’s changed. But also it seems that things have changed a lot for you. The focus has moved away from developing, manufacturing, selling, supporting a small number of specialized high end systems. It’s no longer a small number of very high end systems.

Steven Woolven: That’s correct. So to fill in a little bit of the detail as we go here connected to what you just talked about. So having sold the first POS LV system to Roadware, what we didn’t have at the time was an inertial sensor that we were going to base the system on. We had played with a number of very high end, very expensive inertial sensors. We knew them well because we had used them for defense applications. But they weren’t really practical for commercial systems.

So in September of ’93, a few months after we inked the first deal, we actually acquired 25 surplus IMUs. These were Westinghouse IMUs, Westinghouse branded IMUs that were developed originally for government, US government program. And we acquired them in a fire sale, and they became the very first commercial IMUs that we used. These were very high end systems that as part of the original program were terribly expensive. But because we got them at such a good price we were able to use them for the first sort of two dozen deliveries in the commercial world.

So that really is what started Applanix on its commercial success. So in February of ’94 we actually delivered the first system to Roadware. That was the first land system deliver to Roadware based on these IMUs. And then in June of ’94 we delivered the first marine system. That went to the Canadian Hydrographic Service here in Canada. I know that delivery very well because I personally did the install on that one.

And then we delivered in January of ’95 our first airborne system. That was delivered to (sounds like: Aquiter) in Italy. Followed up by May in ’95 of our first TGR track geometry system delivered to Union Pacific in the US. So it’s kind of a rapid succession of product expansion if you will based on some of those core technologies.

So you’re right, in the early days, the late ‘90s our systems were based on quite high end expensive technology. But we could see where that technology ultimately was going to wind up. So we started with fog technology or ring laser gyro technology. But eventually we knew that the MEMs, micro electronic machine sensors technology was going to become good enough and cheap enough that it was going to be able to allow us to move into applications that we simply couldn’t with the high end and in some cases government restricted technology.

So as that technology became more affordable, became good enough, we continued to move these kind of sensors into our products. Something that we’ve done pretty much since Applanix started, looking at new technologies, working with new manufacturers, figuring out where best fits from a cost performance perspective. And so that allowed us then to get into more of the commercial mass markets if you will, and one of them that you’d be most familiar with would be the UAV market, where we’re now shipping hundreds of these on a very, very regular basis into the UAV applications. And again, you’ve got a size, weight, power restriction. But cost is a big element of that. And the only way you could do that was with clearly a much lower cost initial and GNSS sensor than you could have done in the early days.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Yes, it’s been quite a change. So going back to yourself briefly. You complete three degrees in electrical engineering at the University of Toronto. So do you come from that part of the world?

Steven Woolven: I was born in Toronto, but my dad was relocated to Ottawa. So the capital of Canada, about four and a half hours east of where I’m sitting today. So I grew up there, which was a lovely city to grow up in as a kid. And then came back early teens to Toronto for most of my high school education and then my university education.

Dr. Stewart Walker: And then you joined Applanix way back 1992. So there’s a short gap between the conclusion of your PhD and joining Applanix. And I guess in that time you were converted. You saw a future in the geospatial side.

Steven Woolven: It’s an interesting story. So I had finished my master’s degree and went straight into PhD degree. The areas that I was working in was integrated optics. So think about computers built on optical technology. It was funded by one of the defense organizations here in Canada. And it was being used for things like target tracking, target detection. You have a pretty good idea of what the application was. And the scientific advisor who was out of Valcartier in the province of Quebec here happened to be sitting across the aisle from the scientific advisor who had been working with Applied Analytics.

…and so the two of them got to talking, and as I was subsequently graduated from my PhD, I was doing postdoc research at U of T, continuing the work I had been doing as part of my PhD. And I was lecturing grad students and undergrad students with the intent to almost for sure go into academia. So I was headed down the professor path. So these two scientific advisors got to talking, and my scientific advisor suggested I go meet this very small company, Applied Analytics.

This was in the summer of 1991. Of course you couldn’t go Google Applied Analytics to find out what they were up to. So I remember driving up and meeting Blake and Bruno and Eric. Not knowing anything about what the company was other than a little bit of background from what scientific advisor had told me. I remember leaving the company after meeting with them all afternoon and thinking, wow, I don’t know if these guys are going to be successful. But the vision that they laid out for where they want to go was just so interesting, so inspiring, that I felt I had to be part of that.

So I joined them on a contract for I guess it was close to a year in the summer of ’91 to the summer of ’92, when I then came on board as an employee in the engineering division. And the work that we had done as part of my PhD came into Applied Analytics at the time. And again, it fit quite well with the ongoing work in the Defense Department. But it was in the area of image detection, image recognition. What happened quite quickly as we started to take the technology that had been developed into the commercial space, and we met companies like Roadware, quickly everybody who was involved in any part of the business, other than the position in orientation areas that we now talk about, were quickly sucked into that part of the business.

And so we wound down fairly quickly the defense contract part of that and then moved everybody into the position and orientation part of the business. So I was part of the engineering group for quite some time, sort of moving into as a researcher and a project leader and a group leader and then eventually taking over as engineering manager of the department when we formally split the manufacturing side and the engineering side. That was kind of my early history with Applanix.

Dr. Stewart Walker: I find these things really interesting, the beginnings of strands that have become pervasive throughout our industry by 2025. So this path into Applanix with one, two, three degrees from the University of Toronto, is that fairly common? Have a lot of your employees come down that path?

Steven Woolven: Certainly they have. Today our staff based here in Toronto is about 100 people and worldwide this division is about 150 people. And of the folks here in the Toronto area about 30% of them have postgraduate degrees, PhDs and master’s, not all in the engineering group. We’ve got Joe Hutton who you mentioned earlier on the business side. So we have quite a mix. We’ve done remarkably successful with Canadian universities. So U of T, University of Toronto being a big one for us. We’re co-located. We’ve brought a lot of interns in over the years, and some of those interns then go on to be employees.

University of Calgary, of course very well known in the geomatics business. Hired quite a number of people from them over the years. UNB, University of New Brunswick, same sort of thing. We’ve got York, another university here in the Toronto area, Waterloo, University of Waterloo. Well known for their co-op programs, located about an hour west of where we are. And then we’ve hired a number of folks internationally of universities in the EU or in India. So sort of as we’ve continued to grow brought a lot of folks in from all around the world.

Dr. Stewart Walker: I was grateful to hear the mention of UNB. Of course I’m an alumnus of that school. So yes, you were right when you said that we know Joe Hutton well, and he’s published in the magazine and so on. And I was talking to him at Geo Week a couple of weeks ago. I also know Kevin Perkins on the sales side well. And I think what comes across—and it’s relevant to yourself also—many of your employees have been with Applanix a very long time. Is there a secret to that longevity of employment?

Steven Woolven: So Joe predates me. After the founders and the officer manager he was about employee number five. I was technically employee number seven. So as you said, been around a long, long time. I think there’s a few things that keep people part of the organization. I think it’s a combination of the work we do and how it impacts people around the world and the infrastructure. Our products have been used in all kinds of natural disasters. NOAA uses them regularly for mapping pre and post-hurricane events. And some of the worst events have been mapped by NOAA, and then the technology is used for the first responders on the ground to get to people who are in very difficult situations and need help urgently.

We’re a part of the Deep Water Horizon project, the clean up, multiple earthquake recovery projects. Part of projects like the Antarctic Ice program, that’s mapped on an annual basis. Many, many security events, inaugurations in the US or the G20, G7 events around the world. It’s those kind of programs that allow people to connect the work they’re doing with what’s happening out in the world or being able to visually see how your work is impacting people around the world. And I think that’s a very powerful influence on the work and the people.

I think we’ve got a tremendous team here at the Applanix division, but right across Trimble, and we’ll talk more about Trimble in just a moment. So I think it’s the teams. I think it’s the team dynamics and the work we do. We get to do a lot of leading edge stuff. We do a lot of work in the autonomy space, which can – we’ll talk about here shortly. And it’s really exciting stuff. Our very first DSS, our digital sensor system, which is one of the first medium format airborne systems is now on display at the Smithsonian in an exhibit that’s dedicated to the transition of aerial mapping from the analog world to the digital world.

So that’s again, being part of history is very exciting for employees. It’s something you can point to and be proud of. And I think today from the early days of Applanix to where we are today, we currently operate in 72 countries. So again, we’ve got tremendous international exposure. Our teams get to travel internationally, meet people all around the world and help people solve difficult problems. So I think it’s that combination which I think speaks a lot to why people come and, as you say, have stayed for a long time.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Thank you. Now for a word from our sponsor LAStools.

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Dr. Stewart Walker: Now Steve, I maybe wasn’t the only one who was a little worried 20 years ago that Applanix would not do well from the acquisition by Trimble in the sense that that was at the beginning of a spree of acquisitions by a very large GNSS player. We’ve all seen these things from time to time go wrong. But really the opposite has been true. Trimble Applanix is a successful, highly respected part of Trimble. Would you agree that the acquisition and the organizations working together has been a big success? Where do you sit in the Trimble structure, and what do you get out of being in the big company?

Steven Woolven: Moving back into the late ‘90s we had intimate knowledge of inertial sensors. We weren’t building them and didn’t feel we had the need or the requirement to build them because there were so many companies building inertial sensors. We could pick and choose a performance and the price we needed. So it didn’t at that time make a lot of sense. But the integration of the inertial technology with GNSS technology, GPS at the time, is really what Applanix’s crown jewels are. I know many people think about us as a hardware company. I personally don’t. I think about us – our IP is what we now call the sensor fusion engine. That’s the integration of all these sensors to produce a position and orientation solution.

So back in the late ‘90s we knew we needed more intimate access to GPS or GNSS technology. We couldn’t buy that kind of access. We couldn’t develop it. So one of our strategic goals was to go out and find a GPS, GNSS company that we could be part of. Because it was the only way that we could make our sensor fusion engine better. So we started talking to Trimble in 1999. This was just after Steve Berglund had taken over Trimble from Charlie Trimble.

And so the visions matched up well, but the timing wasn’t quite right. Again, Blake who was running the company at the time and then Steve met again in 2003, we knew Trimble was a good fit for Applanix. We’d convinced Steve that Applanix was a good fit for Trimble, and over dinner in February they agreed to (inaudible) outline of a deal and then the acquisition was closed by July of the same year.

There were a few things as part of the acquisition that was really critical for both pieces. One, it gave us access to the GNSS technology and the ability to create a tightly coupled sensor fusion engine, which we knew we needed to for future capability of the products. Also gave us access to Trimble’s channels. Trimble was a well known marketing engine, sales engine, which Applanix was certainly weaker on at the time. Gave us financial stability as we continued to grow in the early years, which was definitely very critical. Gave us expertise to what is now 12,000 staff across Trimble. A massive international footprint, which would have been much more difficult had we been trying to do that on our own.

And the intent was always to take this sensor fusion technology and move it right through all of Trimble’s products. So taking Trimble from a sort of GNSS centric to a true sensor fusion, integrating cameras and lidars and inertial sensors right through Trimble’s products. That was always the vision. As usual everything always takes a little longer than it does on a PowerPoint presentation. But that is where we are today. The technology that exists across Trimble is a combined effort. Right across the Trimble development teams, including the Applanix R&D team, and that technology has now made it into many of the Trimble products that you see on the market today.

So I think from that perspective it’s been a win/win from the acquisition perspective. And being part of the Trimble family has definitely been a huge piece of the Applanix success story.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Excellent. Okay, well, let’s now try to bring things up to date. You’ve mentioned the number of employees that you have. Are you able to say any more about your financial performance, about how quickly you’re growing? Are these numbers split out to the rest of Trimble? Or is it all confidential?

Steven Woolven: So from a financial perspective no, we’re not allowed to talk specifically about Applanix as a division. Where we sit though is we’re part of the field systems segment. This is a segment that was formed in late 2003. There are three segments within Trimble, and those segments are reported publicly. So that information is available.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Yes indeed.

Steven Woolven: So the segment that we’re part of is appropriate of a $1.5 billion annual revenue segment. So it’s responsible for the mid 40, 45% of Trimble’s revenue. And the person running that segment is Ron Bisio, somebody who has been part of Trimble for a very long time. Well known in the geospatial business. And I think by bringing the field systems segment together it’s brought together a very strong powerhouse of geospatial capabilities within this one segment.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Okay, so how do you work geographically? You’ve got roughly 50 employees who are not in Toronto. Do you have offices around the world? Or do you work through the Trimble channels, the distributors?

Steven Woolven: I think about the way Trimble reports its revenue geographically, Applanix is somewhat similar. Majority is in the Americas and then splitting between Europe and the Middle East and then APAC region is sort of generally how the market’s split out. Typically the way the geospatial markets split out. So we have sales and support offices around the world. We work directly with a number of OEMs. OEMs whose names you’ll know quite well. In the marine segment there’d be folks like NORBIT or Teledyne. In the lidar segment you’ve got folks like Teledyne Optic, Riegl names, you know, all known quite well.

We work with certain distribution channels in certain parts of the world where it makes sense. We do use Trimble channels in certain parts of the world where it makes sense. Then we have direct to end customers in some of the areas as well. So it is certainly a mix of how we do business around the world. The customer success teams are segmented geographically. So we have people in every time zone, so that if customers do run into issues at a dock or on an air strip, they have access to people in their time zones that can help them with immediately solving problems. If it’s a hardware problem, getting stuff shipped to them urgently. And if need be those can be passed on to different folks or as the sun comes up around the world. So we found that works extremely well because in this business if you’ve got a survey vessel or an aircraft that’s grounded, it can be very expensive for the survey.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Yes indeed. Well, thank you for being so frank about these aspects. I’m sure you’re champing at the bit to talk about the current technology. So as we’ve said already, Trimble Applanix became famous for its high end airborne systems. But in recent years you’ve made a killing with the APX systems for UAVs. And the UAV lidar integrators have grabbed these eagerly. So please tell us a little about the origins and development of these systems and their adoption.

Steven Woolven: So moving on from the high end systems, as we were talking about in the late ‘90s, early 2000s, as we moved into using MEMS technology and the GNSS pieces became less expensive. It allowed us to enter then into markets that we couldn’t have touched 20 years ago. So products like TX1, RTX or APX, RTX, RTX services alone or post-processed RTX, many of those products became possible because of the cost point of the products that are being sold.

That’s not quite enough in order to expand into even larger markets from an Applanix perspective, keeping in mind that still our markets are somewhat smaller than many of the larger Trimble markets. So to move into those markets we’ve taken a slightly different business approach as opposed to selling hardware and/or selling software. We’ve moved into more of a recurring revenue model, and you see that more and more in many businesses now. One of the reasons we’re doing it is because the upfront cost then is quite a bit less expensive.

So you can effectively get access to the technology for a much lower upfront cost. You can pay for the technology on a pay per use. Let’s say the number of minutes flown, for example. You pay for only the minutes that are actually used as part of a survey application. And that allows then customers to use it in applications where they never could have before. So that’s been a significant change to the business over the last ten years.

Focusing a lot more on the software piece, things like post-processed RTX. RTX is Trimble’s correction service, offering sentimetric positioning all around the world. Products like Lidar QC, quality control software, brand new announced POSPac Assure, which is based on cloud technologies. POSPac Cloud, again, based on cloud technologies. What we’re trying to do is lower the entry level from a both cost perspective and a complexity perspective. In the early days of using this technology it was pretty complicated. It definitely took a lot of training and a lot of experience to be able to use it well.

We’ve now got to the point with products like POSPac Assure where once you’ve done your survey you simply load that data up to the cloud, and you get back your answer. It allows people to really focus on what they’re good at, which is the survey, the application, solving their customer’s and worrying less about how the technology works or solving problems with the data collection process or the data quality during that collection process. So that’s really opened up a new group of customers that we simply couldn’t have touched ten or fifteen years ago.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Yes indeed. Well, I was able to talk to you back at the INTERGEO in Stuttgart about APX, RTX, just about the time it was being introduced. And then I had a conversation with Joe a couple of weeks ago in Denver. And one of the exciting things I think is that part of that product really is access to the POSPac software, if the customer judges that it’s needed for the final tweak of accuracy.

Steven Woolven: Absolutely. So we have customers that split into real time applications, and we have those that do only post-processed applications, depending on what accuracy you’re trying to hit or what your workflow software looks like. Then we have customers that intend to do real time, but if something goes wrong all the data of course has been recorded. So then they can post-process in order to save the mission. Because again, the large cost of doing this, delivering your final end product is in collecting the data.

And so the last thing you want to have to do is get back to the office and find out you’ve had data quality issues, and you can’t post-process the mission. Or you can’t process the mission. So again, having recorded that data, having access to real time corrections or post-processed corrections allows you then to go and process the dataset if you need better accuracy or if you have to deal with data quality issues or in some cases reuse the dataset. It may be for one of your customers, a real time application data quality was fine. You may have another customer that needs higher quality that you can go back and post-process that same data. Get higher quality and basically double your revenue from that one data acquisition project.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Now when I spoke to Joe about this he was also excited about the PX1 product, which embraces the same technology. But it’s a product that is used for flying and landing UAVs accurately. That means you sell that product to UAV manufacturers. So that involves different sales channels. That’s a different group of customers to the others that we’ve been talking about so far today.

Steven Woolven: That’s right. For the UAV side, so we’ve had a long history of providing position and orientation solutions, primarily for on board sensors, cameras, lidar, hyperspectral, whatever happens to be on board. But we’ve always had the ability to provide data for navigation use as well. But typically that hasn’t been where we’ve wanted to play. So a few years ago we made the decision to look at what would the market look like if we now took this technology and specifically made it for the navigation of the UAV?

And there’s still a pretty strong desire to have a navigation system separate from your sensor suite. So you still typically want to have either a backup system or two different sources of positional information. So that’s where the PX1 was launched. Again, it was launched as a subscription type model. It was not launched as a single sale. But in terms of the customer sets, some of the customers were very familiar to us. We were already providing direct deal referencing technology for their on board sensor suite.

So now we began talking to them about providing it for the navigation piece. Where the difference – the slight difference was, well, we now had to provide data to the flight management systems, and those were the folks that we really didn’t have a lot of history with, at least on the UAV side. So we had to get to know them. We had to do of course the engineering to get the elements integrated. But we did have a slightly easier job going in through the existing UAV OEMs that we’ve of course been working with for many years.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Okay, well, I do remember when we were talking in Stuttgart, you mentioned scintillation and ionispheric interference. You were obviously very interested in those. Could you say a little bit more about those topics, and why should the lidar community be concerned?

Steven Woolven: Sure. So this year is supposed to be the peak of the scintillation activity. We’ve seen several examples over the last 12 months, and every time you open your news feed in the morning and you see the northern lights, especially up here in the Northern Hemisphere, are visible as far south as Toronto, you know there’s something going on. So we had customers that are in South America. We have customers working in Northern Canada. Many of these are mining clients where the northern lights are lovely to look at. But they cause havoc when you’re trying to navigate or get positional information when you’re operating a mine site.

Some of these mine sites are autonomous mine sites. So you’ve got nobody on board these very large vehicles. And if you are shut down for multiple hours at a time as a result of the scintillation impacts, it obviously is very expensive. So Trimble has launched a technology called IonoGard. That technology is used specifically to help guard against these scintillation events and provide much wider availability specifically for customers operating in these difficult environments.

And we have customers that are on land using this application. But we also have customers working in the marine space where they’re surveying offshore. But again, far north or far south and are also impacted by this type of activity. So this summer is supposed to be the peak, and after this it should get quite a bit better for its usual cycle of ten or eleven years. But this type of technology is going to be critical for the next nine to twelve months.

Dr. Stewart Walker: And just in your explanation there I can see the great depth of both scientific and engineering expertise that you have in your organization. This is not really my field, and I’m very impressed. Thank you. So let’s end really just by asking you, would you like to say a little bit about some current directions and what you’ve got in the pipeline for the next year or two for Trimble Applanix?

Steven Woolven: Sure. We talked a little bit about some of this already. But from our perspective we’re going to continue to move into lower cost markets. That is where the bigger market opportunities are. While of course continuing to support our historic markets, our crude airborne markets, the lidar market, the camera markets, the very high end systems which we’re quite well known for. Continue to move into software as a service application. So again, for some of these lower cost markets, being able to pay on an as mission basis or a permanent basis for these applications makes a huge amount of sense to customers. And that allows us to open up markets who said we couldn’t get access to.

We have a long history of looking at inertial sensors. Trimble now makes some of its own inertial sensors. So back in the early days we said it didn’t make sense. At some point it became that that does make sense. But we continue to evaluate inertial sensors from all the manufacturers around the world. We work with many manufacturers based all around the world. And we look at how that technology, how that cost point will fit within our applications so that we continue to provide the best quality of products for the lowest cost. And we’ve got a lot of technology, a lot of IP around the calibration and the improvement of inertial sensor performance.

Ongoing challenges with jamming, something you’ve heard quite a lot about over the last sort of 18, 24 months. Spoofing challenges, that’s an area that we’re actively working in. Improving our sensor fusion engine. That is an ongoing effort being used more and more, right across Trimble applications. New sensors, cameras, lidars, radars being integrated into the sensor fusion engine. Again, from the complexity of let’s use what’s available. Let’s be able to produce the lowest cost and best solution that’s possible.

And then of course improvements to the sensor fusion engine itself. That’s where we spend a lot of our R&D dollars, getting that engine to be the best engine that is possible being used both in real time as well as in post-processed applications.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Excellent, thank you. Well, I think based on the history that we’ve discussed today, those initiatives are likely to be successful. But they’re also likely to keep you very busy. So Steve, thank you very much indeed. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation, and I’m very grateful that you’ve been able to participate in the LIDAR magazine podcast. We wish you well with this approach, with these ideas that you have for the future. We hope that we’ll be able to feature Trimble Applanix again in both articles or podcasts. Listeners will want to know that Trimble Applanix is running a user group meeting in Toronto in April this year. Details are on the website. Thank you.

Steven Woolven: Thank you Stewart. It was really nice to get to talk to you again in this format. Always like to tell the Trimble Applanix story because as you say, the way in which businesses wind up being successful or some of the people wind up being successful is always an interesting story. And again, thank you for mentioning our user group meeting in Toronto. We are very excited about this. This is the first users group meeting we have had since 2018. Of course being interrupted by COVID. So we are really looking forward to this, and we have a tremendous line up of speakers, of educational sessions and good social events as well. So thank you again.

Dr. Stewart Walker: Thank you. Well, I’m sure listeners will have enjoyed your company and comments today just as much as I have. So I want to underline our gratitude to our sponsor the popular LAStools lidar processing software. And we hope listeners will join us for forthcoming podcasts. We’re certainly expecting some guests whom we believe you’ll want to hear. If you want to ask about our podcasts or make comments, don’t hesitate to contact us. Thank you for listening. Good day.

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This edition of the LIDAR Magazine Podcast is brought to you by rapidlasso. Our flagship product, the LAStools software suite is a collection of highly efficient, multicore command line tools to classify, tile, convert, filter, raster, triangulate, contour, clip, and polygonize lidar data. Visit rapidlasso.de for details.

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