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On Hedgehogs and Marvelous Minds: A New Technology for Point Data Collection? - Ep 179
277 Plays3 years ago
We love it when archaeologists look at other technologies that on first glance are not appropriate for archaeology. However, they're willing to give it a try and report on the results! The researches in the article we discuss used an indoor positioning system (IPS) to map an outdoor site in Israel. Their results are encouraging for this emerging technology.
Connect with James on Twitter: @paleoimaging
For rough transcripts of this episode go to www.archpodnet.com/archaeotech/179
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- Chris Webster
- Twitter: @archeowebby
- Email: chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com
- Paul Zimmerman
- Twitter: @lugal
- Email: paul@lugal.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsorship
00:00:00
Speaker
You've been hearing ads for Zencaster these past months. Interested in sponsoring this show or podcast ads for your business? Go to zen.ai forward slash The Archaeology Show and fill out the contact information so Zencaster can help you bring your business story to life. You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
Episode Introduction and Topics
00:00:23
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Archiotech Podcast, Episode 179. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, Paul Zimmerman. Today we discuss an article about indoor positioning systems being used for outdoor site mapping. Let's get to it.
00:00:37
Speaker
All right.
Photogrammetry Experiences
00:00:38
Speaker
Welcome to the archaeotech podcast, everybody. Paul, how's it going? It's going pretty good. I've been keeping myself busy doing some CRM here in the Northeast. Not actually fieldwork, just artifact processing, but in discussions with the owner of the company that I was working for, he wanted me to do some photogrammetry experiments. He had a number of pictures that he took, like 90 plus of these colonial period privies that they had excavated that was processing the
00:01:05
Speaker
the materials from. And so we generated photogrammetry structure for motion models around those. And then I experimented a lot in my backyard with my flower boxes, raised beds rather, to see how many pictures, what different kinds of cameras, which different software of different open source packages. And in the end, I got what I think is a decent workflow
00:01:28
Speaker
using WebODM and a handheld digital camera and a pole for some up above shots and so you know that was fun to actually be given a project like that that was somewhat open-ended but also I learned a lot from and then could report that back to him some ideas about best practices. So would you say you're enjoying what some would call retirement? Yeah.
00:01:51
Speaker
I am most definitely enjoying. I finished up my, you know, I got my computer program that I've talked about off and on to a point that I just published it today on GitHub. So we'll have the links for that. And that's a total station surveying software. And I use the total station with my software, and I'm sure you can hear my dog barking in the background now.
00:02:16
Speaker
I used my Total Station with my software in order to map in the ground control points that I was using for the photogrammetry test. So it was nice, you know, the confluence of these different things that I've been doing all coming together. And then, you know, in a couple of weeks, I'm probably going to be back off in the field in the Middle East again. So we'll see how that works.
00:02:36
Speaker
There you go. There you go. Sounds like you're keeping busy, that's for sure. Oh yeah, very. And that's a good thing. Where are you? How are you keeping busy right
Travel and Real Estate in Mexico
00:02:44
Speaker
now? Well, we just got back from two weeks down in Mexico, Cabo San Lucas. We went down there just to, I wouldn't say quite live like locals. I mean, I guess we were. We were in an Airbnb in a small condo complex where I think only maybe there was one other rental.
00:02:59
Speaker
Well, they might've been local rentals, but one of the like Airbnb there. And so we were there with people that, you know, live there full time and just work and up in a neighborhood outside Cabo. And it was fun. It was nice just being there and just kind of hanging out and just kind of pretending to like live in a place like that where every once in a while you can go do something fancy or run a jet ski or, you know, whatever. And it was fun. I liked it. And I don't know, we've been considering
00:03:27
Speaker
potentially buying a place down there as an income property and a place we could visit. But I think we want to visit a few more places in Mexico, especially maybe on the Baja a few more times before we make a decision like that. But it's a cool place to go. Lots of history down there, too.
00:03:42
Speaker
Yeah. So, but we're currently on the Oregon coast in Florence, Oregon and headed up to Seattle at the end of this week. I'll be up there for a few weeks. The next time we record, actually, if there, if there is a next time, I haven't looked at the calendar, you might be out of the country on a plane, but no, I think, I think that I get one more recording before I leave.
00:04:01
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I'll be up in the Seattle area by that time. So if anybody's listening to this and is up in the Seattle area and you want to meet up, let's, let's have a chat and hit us up on the socials or, you know, wherever you see this podcast and maybe we'll, we'll set up an architect meetup.
Article Introduction: 3D Data Collection
00:04:15
Speaker
I don't know how many, how many listeners we have in the Seattle area. So yeah, that'd be cool.
00:04:19
Speaker
Yeah. All right. Well, let's talk about the article of the day. And Paul, you found this one, so I'll let you go ahead and introduce this. Right. So the last issue of Advances in Archaeological Practice from November 2021, when it came out, there were lots of great articles in it.
00:04:36
Speaker
So you tasked me to look at a few different articles in this issue, and they were great ones. And this one was the first one I pulled out, I believe. The title is, it's catchy. It's on hedgehogs and marvelous minds.
00:04:51
Speaker
a new technology for point data collection. I could see immediately by point data collection, this is going to be mapping and this is something that interests me. The authors are Austin Hill, Morag Cursul, and York Rowan. I don't know if I've met Austin before. I've definitely met Morag online a couple of times and interacted with her. I also knew that this is going to most likely be something Middle East related and so therefore, maybe a little bit in my wheelhouse.
00:05:21
Speaker
And yeah, I really enjoyed this article. This is another one of the ones that we see in AAP a lot that I always, and I sound like a broken record, but I always praise when people do this kind of thing. Here's my approach at using X, Y, or Z technology, and here's what worked, and here's what didn't, and here's what we'd like to improve.
00:05:41
Speaker
the kind of free-flowing open discussion of various technologies, kind of like what we try to do on this podcast, but in a slightly more structured, rigorous form in a journal. And so I really like AAP for these kinds of articles. And before we get too far into this, I really wanted to thank the authors of the article for writing about their work and what they did, because they have highs and lows with it, but I've got great ideas coming out of it with
00:06:11
Speaker
I think that's a success. Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, I like the structure of the article too. They talk about a few existing technologies and some of the challenges about that. And then, and then get into the current technology they want to talk about and then have a pretty decent case study where they're honest about the results, which I appreciate.
00:06:29
Speaker
Yeah.
Mapping Technologies: Limitations and Alternatives
00:06:30
Speaker
All right. Well, let's get into this article then, as I mentioned, just to kind of set the stage here, you know, this is about collecting 3d point data on an archeological site. Right. And they first talk about some of the, the usual ways of doing that, you know, one of which being a total station, we've all been, we've all seen a total station out on site. Paul, you've got, I think a couple of them at home that you've cobbled together into like a working one.
00:06:54
Speaker
I have one very good working one and the cobbled together ones I sold during the pandemic. Right, right. Nice, nice. Well, and see, this is the issue with total stations, right? Like you get these total stations and it practically takes a PhD just to learn how to run the damn thing if you've never run one before, because they're not like their menu systems and just how they operate. They're not like super intuitive for most archaeologists, I would say. Once you really kind of fundamentally understand what it's supposed to do,
00:07:24
Speaker
you can start understanding some of the jargony terminology they have inside them. And then you can probably run just about any total station. But that was my challenge. One of the first ones I ever ran was a TopCon and it took a little while for me to kind of get into it. And then I ended up on a project, I don't know, maybe a year or two later,
00:07:42
Speaker
where they had a Leica total station and literally nobody knew how to run it. And we were just like moving along with this excavation and they were like, so is anybody want to just like take this home and figure it out? And I'm just like, yeah, I'll take him home on the weekend and figure it out. I've watched some YouTube videos and did
00:07:57
Speaker
some research and, and ended up figuring out how to use it. And my knowledge of the top con helped out a little bit, but then getting into the like, I was able to do it. But then this is the problem that the authors present is like, now you're the total station guy and there's like only one person that knows how to do it. And there's only so much that you can record.
00:08:14
Speaker
You know, you have to put that thing in different points and record them and it can just be a real pain in the ass to get enough point data from one person in one unit. Well, one person, unless you have a robotic total station, one person isn't enough. You have to have two people. Yeah. And so when I did lots and lots of total stations surveying in this, especially in Petra, Jordan, we, I always had, you know, a two person cruise, me and my pole boy.
00:08:44
Speaker
And if he ever listens to this, he's going to enjoy having been called Cold Boy in a public forum. So it's a two person crew. So if you have dedicated a lot of surveying like we did on that project, you've removed two people from your entire project to dedicate them to this one mapping project. More often than not, what you have is that one person like you
00:09:08
Speaker
with the Leica that knows how to run it. And every time somebody needs a point elevation and they need a line or something, they call you and then they grab the pole and take the shots. And that works, but it does. It is disruptive. And if you're busy with something else, they've got to wait
Indoor Positioning Systems (IPS) Overview
00:09:25
Speaker
and they can't proceed until you're free. And then it really is a bottleneck. And that's one of the things that they discuss in the opening of this article are these bottlenecks.
00:09:35
Speaker
to the traditional surveying tools that we use in archaeology. Total stations and the other ones, of course, are GNSS receivers. Yeah, absolutely. You got similar limitations with cost, especially if you want to get sub-meter accuracy. Even if you're using one of the Bluetooth GNSS receivers, like we use the Aero 100, I mean, even those are still well over $1,000 just for the device. And then, obviously, you need something to
00:10:02
Speaker
something to hook it to, and then you need something to read all the data and do stuff with it. The cost ends up becoming prohibitive for a lot of projects that are fixed costs. The way that they're using the hedgehogs and marvelous mines, the way that they're using their data collection
00:10:22
Speaker
wouldn't even be appropriate with a sub meter GNSS receiver. They're really talking about centimeter level accuracy, something like you would get with the total station. So that ramps up the cost even more. And then you run into the same problem that you have with the total station is that you have maybe just one on the project because they're expensive. And you have maybe just one person on the project because they're the only one that really knows how to run this thing.
00:10:47
Speaker
Right. And now that person, that's like all they can do too, because they're doing it all the time. Yeah. So you just lost an excavator, somebody that can actually do stuff and they're stuck doing this the entire time. And then regardless of the staffing problems, both of these technologies have
00:11:04
Speaker
limitations as to where they can be used. So total stations obviously have problems with line of sight. You need line of sight in order to take that point. So if you're in a place, if you're working with trees or buildings or any other kind of physical obstruction, that's a problem.
00:11:20
Speaker
If the trenches get deep enough, you have to be up higher and or use a long enough pole to be able to take those points down in the trench. And if the trenches are dispersed enough across the site, you might not be able to actually take points from any middle location. The site that I was at at Lagash will probably have excavations separated by a couple hundred meters when we go back next year. And oh, geez, a couple hundred meters, no, a kilometer.
00:11:51
Speaker
Yeah, and so that means that either we plant it on a high ground somewhere in the middle and hope to be able to take those really long half kilometer shots, which are going to be less accurate, and take longer for each shot to get the bounce back. But it also means that if I'm the totalization guy, and I'm not the totalization guy in that project, but if I'm the totalization guy and you need me on the set of trenches on the south, but I'm on the north,
00:12:17
Speaker
You know, call me, radio me, then I have to walk a half kilometer to get to the point and then, you know, well, no, let's, I'm assuming that I set up and level at first thing on the project, but even then just getting from wherever I'm working to the, to the total station to take the shots. Uh, but that's, you know, I had a kilometer, it would probably be more sensible to have two total stations, one set up near each set of trenches. That's doubling the cost. And.
00:12:45
Speaker
Then you still have that staffing issue. Do I have to march a kilometer from one set of trenches to the other set of trenches every time anybody on either of these sets of trenches needs a point elevation? That's not especially efficient. GPS.
00:13:02
Speaker
It doesn't have the line of sight problem, but of course it has problems with satellite reception because it relies on satellite reception. It's notoriously bad if you're under a tree canopy. It's notoriously bad if you're up close to a reflective surface like a building or a cliff face. It totally doesn't work if you're inside.
00:13:22
Speaker
No, I mean, you said in a cave or a rock shelter, you're screwed. Yeah, they will work. Right. And just to be clear, you said it doesn't have a line of sight problem, but it does have a line of sight problem just without just straight up or at least. Yeah.
00:13:40
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm experiencing that right now. As a matter of fact, my Starlink satellite, you know, this is the first location we've had that it's not working super great because we're surrounded by trees. And I've got this thing suspended via poles that I bought to do this as high as I can possibly get it off the RV. It's probably the roof of our RV is 13 feet off the ground. And when our jacks are down,
00:14:03
Speaker
were elevated just a few more inches because the jacks jack us up. And then this pole is sticking probably 12 feet off the top of the RV. And yet still, I've got a little bit of obstruction and that one little bit of obstruction in my visibility on the dish is causing an internet dropout, which isn't bad for like streaming services because they usually look ahead enough to cover that dropout that happens every minute or two.
00:14:27
Speaker
But if I'm on like a zoom call or a teams call or something like that, it's complete garbage. It just like completely fails. And I've got to use other means to, uh, to get those calls done. Cause they can't handle a dropout cause it's real time. Yeah. So out of curiosity, this is a good sounding connection you're on right now. What are you using?
00:14:42
Speaker
I am in my dad's house on his wifi because that's where we're at. But I don't generally do my calls from in here. I just figured for the podcast, I would come in here and just, you know, sit in his back room, his music room. I'm surrounded by drum sets and guitars. And this is where they keep their wifi. So yeah, I mean, when you're a digital nomad, you've got to kind of, you know, do what you can. So, right. Right.
00:15:04
Speaker
back to the article, the other thing that they comment on in the intro, and again, just the first two paragraphs of this article just drives home so many things that I've thought about for so long. So if you can get if you can download this article, I'll just read it for pure enjoyment because it's
00:15:21
Speaker
again, nicely written straight to the point. But one of the other things that they comment on is 3D photogrammetry. So the same sort of thing that I was playing with the raised beds in my backyard and that we were doing with the privies. The same thing that I was praising that the excavators were using in Lagash on our last episode. And that has become increasingly part of people's toolboxes, but it's also a little slow.
00:15:45
Speaker
You have to take all those photos. You have to bring it back and upload it to a computer that can process it. And then from there, you can get measurements, provided that you've got good ground control points and things are scaled properly. And that's something that I found is not always necessarily a given. So it's a slower process. It's excellent and can do all sorts of great things. But
00:16:09
Speaker
it has its own problems and in the same like the high-end GNSS receivers and same like the Total Station, you tend to end up with one person who is the go-to for processing these.
00:16:22
Speaker
So you may not be losing that one person in the field, but at the end of the day on the dig, you've lost that person because they're processing all the photogrammetry work from all the trenches that were excavated and then extracting the data from there and handing that back to the excavators who are putting that back into whatever their notation is.
00:16:45
Speaker
And all these technologies are awesome. And it's awesome that we use them. That's something I really like about archaeology is that we use all sorts of different technologies in lots of sorts of different ways, practically and effectively. But there's never any one size fits all. And so what they try is, and we'll get back to this after the break,
00:17:06
Speaker
but they try a new system called indoor positioning systems, IPSs. And these, again, like almost everything for archeology was not designed for archeology, but they give it a go. There you go. All right. With that, we will talk more about IPS as it's called, which I love. We've got GPS. Now we have IPS.
Promotional Content and Additional Resources
00:17:25
Speaker
And we will talk about that on the other side of this break and stick around for segment three, where we'll have a case study that's mentioned in the article.
00:17:31
Speaker
that, like I said in the beginning, is a really honest case study about whether or not this actually worked and is ready for prime time. So we'll be back in a minute. Be sure to listen to our little sponsors and promos and ads and stuff like that. They really help us out and look down at your phone and click on the links in the show notes for this article and also for some of our advertisers. So you can help out the APN and help out yourself with some extra knowledge back in a minute.
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Speaker
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00:19:35
Speaker
Welcome back to episode 179 of the archaeotech podcast. And we are talking about a recent article in, well, I guess recent 2021 in archaeological advances from the SAAs. So go ahead and check the link to that in the show notes if you don't have the article. If you don't have access to the article, that's what we're here for. So we're pretty much doing a deep dive on this one article for the entire episode.
00:19:57
Speaker
But again, if you have access to it, it'd be great to go over and take a look. It's well written. So let's get into talking about what IPS is. Paul just brought it up at the last minute at the end of the first segment. So now we're going to talk about it. But for some, I guess, attributes of IPS that help it work when the other technologies we mentioned don't work. One of the things is obviously it doesn't rely on GPS satellites. This is not
00:20:23
Speaker
a global positioning system. It's more of a local positioning system. They call it an indoor positioning system, but I think if projects like this archaeological project we talk about in segment three end up really using it and other people in similar outdoor situations can use it, they may have to change the name because this was designed for indoor use. IPS was developed
00:20:44
Speaker
by companies and one of the ones they talk about here is Marvel Mind Robotics. It's also linked in those show notes here. It's developed by them to improve indoor robotics navigation and things like the tracking of customers and merchandise and stuff like that, basically indoors in big warehouses, in small warehouses, whatever the case may be, but tracking where things are and just the current state of things and how they're fluctuating and moving and also providing mapping systems for internal
00:21:10
Speaker
robots to move around. You might be thinking, what the hell are we talking about? But Amazon for a while now has been using robotic, I guess, polars. I don't know what you'd call them, but robotic devices to pull and stock products off of shelves. There's still people in there. They're not fully replaced yet, but to be honest, that's probably where it's heading.
00:21:29
Speaker
But they've been using that. And to do that accurately, the robotic devices need to have a really good map of what the area looks like. And I know one of the common problems in robotics these days is devices mapping their surroundings in real time. It's getting better. Tesla vehicles do that. I know that. Other things are getting better at doing that. But mapping is one thing and interpretation is another. So this technology was developed to help at least with the mapping portion of that and help these things move around.
00:21:56
Speaker
Yeah, and what they do, and the system that they went with, this Marvel mind system is just one of, like you said, any of a number of different competitors in this space now. And they're mostly geared for, like you said, industrial applications and typically indoors applications, though I'm not sure there are
00:22:13
Speaker
good ones outdoors. I'm sure they're being developed for various outdoor purposes. Again, even with the inventory tracking, you could see things like on a car lot, which is outdoor lumber yards, things like that perhaps. Basically, what they do is they set up a number of base stations and then
00:22:33
Speaker
your receiver, whatever it is that you're tracking, triangulates between those base stations. There are different ways of doing that and different technologies for gauging the distance, but if you have four or more base stations, you can get a three-dimensional position on something that can talk to all four of those stations.
00:22:53
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And the nice thing about this is it's entirely scalable. I was looking on the website earlier and I mean, they can go up to something like 20,000 square meters of continuous mapping, which is insane. If you just, if you just link these all up together and you put more of these devices out there and, and you just, it's scalable from, I think the smallest area with the four ultrasonic sensors and then the one hedgehog, which we haven't talked about any of that yet, but we'll get into it.
00:23:21
Speaker
What was it, like 30 square meters or something like that? And then if you start adding them on, it becomes scalable out from that point. Yeah. And so in concept, it's a lot like GPS GNSS, right? You have those satellites that your receiver can talk to or can receive the signals from and then do the math to figure out where it is in the world relation to those satellites. So it becomes the same sort of thing. If you have those, the base stations aren't moving, unlike the satellites, which are.
00:23:50
Speaker
But if you have the receiver knows where those base stations are, you know where those base stations are. It's just a math problem. And then you can scale it out, like you said. And I've seen similar things being done for tracking using basically existing infrastructure for Wi-Fi networks within buildings.
00:24:13
Speaker
Yeah. So a lot of it is overlapping, competing, and I think that we're early on. Even though this article talks about work that was done in 2019 and we're a couple years past that at this point, I still get the feeling like this is a space with a lot of
00:24:30
Speaker
fairly rapid advancement and that things haven't gelled yet, that there are going to be different methods, different ways of relying on the signals. I just mentioned Wi-Fi, it would be Bluetooth, the ones that they discuss here uses ultrasonic sensors. Yeah, there are probably other things that we could use as well.
00:24:49
Speaker
I've got the feeling like we're going to start to see a congealing of certain things that work better in certain situations and certain ones that work better in other situations. We'll have a better sense and more robust set of tools that we as archaeologists can rip out of those warehouses and those stockyards and so on and use them on our projects in the field.
00:25:11
Speaker
Yeah.
Challenges in Archaeological Environments
00:25:12
Speaker
And I mean, you're totally right because I feel like this ultrasonic sensor one would not be super great in a lot of archeological environments. And, and you know, purely because it's, it relies on sound, right? And there's almost, I mean, you might think that you've got archeology projects where archeologists were out in the middle of nowhere doing stuff, but sometimes we're in the middle of a city. Sometimes we're out on the open plains, but it's like 40 mile an hour winds while we're doing it.
00:25:37
Speaker
And, you know, there's always people talking. There's usually music or something like that. I mean, we're, we're, we're never like super quiet. So there would have to be some, I guess some concessions taken in with these ultrasonic sensors. Cause just to describe what this is really quick, it's really kind of a sonar from the sounds of it. My rudimentary understanding of it is they're basically shooting out a signal and then that signal is
00:26:02
Speaker
is bouncing off of things. And the time it takes that to come back gives it a sense of distance. And then they're using all of those sensors to basically triangulate points. Because they say, well, we hit this point from this one and this one and this one at these times. And then they're able to map out the points. But again, that's relying on sound to come out and back. And if you've got an interruption in that sound or other loud noises that are interrupting that sound process, then you've got problems.
00:26:29
Speaker
You know what I'm curious about now that you mentioned that, and this is not mentioned in the article, but I was just saying that we're going to start seeing this or we already are seeing this in various industries. I wonder what's being done on construction sites. They're notoriously loud and they're usually semi, if not fully, outdoors.
00:26:49
Speaker
Well, even mining. Holy cow, mining. Like when we worked last year. I'm sure that that's being done. To some extent, the question then becomes one of accuracy. How accurate do these have to be and what's the precision? This particular set
00:27:08
Speaker
is in the range of two centimeters of accuracy, which is not great, but it's definitely within the same practically as most GNSS systems, good ones. And it's not a whole lot worse than total station surveying, which oftentimes is more accurate than is necessary for an archeological context.
00:27:30
Speaker
Well, I mean, I even wonder about the indoor situations where they're saying these were developed for how many, how quiet is a warehouse. You know what I mean? Like, like how, well, what kinds of sounds and what level of sounds actually impact this thing negatively is what I would want to know. Cause there's probably some, some pretty good reliability in the sound as far as different frequencies probably don't expect it. Different decibel levels probably don't affect it. So, so maybe it's not as fragile as we think it is, but uh-huh.
00:27:57
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, that would be some serious concerns before you lug this thing all the way across the world to an archeological site to give it a shot and try it out. But this particular technology as of 2019, and this is mentioned in the article, it is susceptible to wind as a problem. Yeah. And that's, like you said, that's not very good for us. It certainly would have been a problem in Nevada.
00:28:19
Speaker
where those winds are just relentless. Even in Iraq and Lagash where I was at, we had windstorms and strong winds quite regularly. Toward the end, I couldn't fly the drone a number of days in a row just because the winds, they weren't strong strong, but they were strong enough to be a problem.
00:28:38
Speaker
Yeah. So I don't know at what level that wind noise causes a problem with these systems. And so I'm wondering, again, what different kinds of sensor systems are being used and explored in order to overcome that? Well, the nice thing is unlike a $3,000 GPS you may not know how to use or a $1,000 to $5,000 drone you don't know how to fly or operate or have a license for. This
00:29:01
Speaker
starts at a pretty cheap price and you can probably just try it out and, and, and, and see what's going on. And I think the price is listed in the article, so it may be different now, but, uh, 399 euros for a starter kit, which is about 434 us dollars, um, right now, as we're talking about this in may of 2022. And that's not a bad price for just getting the starter kit and just seeing if this thing will even do anything remotely, like what you want it to. And I'm kind of like,
00:29:28
Speaker
Even if it's not super great, but it gets part of the job done for that price, I'll take it. You know what I mean? It's got to be reliable data that it's giving you, but even if it's not able to reliably map everything and you're getting good points over here and you can see that, I don't know what the thing would be.
00:29:46
Speaker
Even partial success at that price would be a pretty good success compared to the cost that things usually are way up there. If it's scalable, like they say it is, that initial starter price means that you can expand it without breaking the bank. You can expand it to the needs of your project.
00:30:04
Speaker
at probably still under $1,000 for this part of the hardware. And I will put a little asterisk on the cost. They also have two computers attached to it. So that's going to add roughly $2,000 to the overall cost of the system.
00:30:24
Speaker
Yeah, so that's a good segue to just talk about the setup on this real quick before we run out of time on this segment, because I want to spend the next one talking about the case study. So some of the just quick and dirty, and this is right from the article here, this uses a minimum, again, this is a starter kit, a minimum of four static beacons, those ultrasonic beacons placed around the area that you want to start mapping.
00:30:46
Speaker
And it uses a modem, a radio frequency modem connected to a computer is the central hub. So that's the first computer Paul's talking about. So you got a modem connected to that. That's basically picking up all these signals. And then to me, it started to get just a little bit confusing. One beacon is a, is a Rover and it's called the hedgehog. And I don't know why they called it a hedgehog. Maybe because it's got little antennas on it and stuff, but
00:31:09
Speaker
Anyway, it's called a hedgehog and that thing receives info from the static beacons and sends it back to the computer. So you've got the four static beacons and you've got the one moving beacon. And I mean, I saw some videos on their website. It's like they, they had a version of this hedgehog that was like this little, you know, robotic thing on like four wheels that was running around. I'm not sure how that would work on most archeological sites.
00:31:32
Speaker
I don't think that that's that that would work on any archaeological site they have on their home page is awesome. It doesn't remind me nearly so much as a hedgehog as the mouse droids from Star Wars. Oh my god. Yeah, you're totally right. That's 100% what it is.
00:31:50
Speaker
Oh, that's awesome. How appropriate since yesterday was Star Wars day, May the 4th. Oh boy. I know. I know. I know. So anyway, so the hedgehog receives that info, sends it back to the PC as well. The PC performs all the calculations on the data that is received and then also sends information back to the hedgehog to improve presumably its
00:32:13
Speaker
sense of space and where it's at and what it's already done. And then all of that info was outputted via USB cable to a tablet. And that's your typical output data standard, NMEA data standard that you can see to GPS devices and stuff like that.
00:32:30
Speaker
But it's a typical data stream that you can do stuff with, not some proprietary, proprietary garbage that you can't do anything with. Right. And then the cool thing about all this, I think I mentioned before the effective range for each beacon is 30 meters. So if you want to go beyond 30 meters, you need obviously more beacons, but that's the whole thing. It's scalable. You can put as many beacons as you want on there, probably up to a limit. I think they do have a limit of like 300 or something like that, but that's, that's a lot. Yeah.
00:32:55
Speaker
And then the whole thing can be geo-referenced. So if you've got your one sub-meter GPS out there, you've got a control point somehow that you're using, you can geo-reference this entire thing once you get the whole mapping done. So it sounds like they've done all that pretty well.
00:33:10
Speaker
Yeah, and I did want to comment a little bit on those two computers that they use. So the one that does all the processing, I don't know what the minimum specs for it are, but they said a Windows or Linux computer. And so they used a fairly low-end Windows computer. But I wonder if you could do it on something really low-end like a Raspberry Pi.
00:33:29
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Because that'll drop the price for that processor computer down to next to nothing, I mean, down to under 100 bucks. Yeah. And then the other one, they're using it for display. So it's taking that NMEA output from the Hedgehog, mapping it real time using QGIS, which is awesome. But if you don't necessarily need that real time display, I wonder if you could just hook up any kind of data logger to it.
00:33:57
Speaker
Oh yeah, probably. Just capture it and then you would save yourself a lot of money and a lot of hassle and you wouldn't have to have a potentially fragile machine out there in the trenches around the pickaxes and things. I mean, I would imagine that would be the case, right? I can't imagine you would need a real time display. That's just kind of a side benefit of it. And when they're doing this for indoor purposes, that's totally makes sense and seems legit. But obviously for outdoor purposes, I mean, you're, you're recording this
00:34:24
Speaker
almost for posterity and analysis later on, not necessarily for current purposes, you know, while you're in the field. So, I mean, it might be nice if you got the ability to see that display so you can make some corrections if you need to, you know, remap an area or something. I'm not sure how that works, but you know, that, that might be a benefit, but, um, yeah, either way, it sounds like there's options. Yeah.
00:34:45
Speaker
Yeah. And the, the beacons are ruggedized, it sounds like. Um, so they're, they're good for outdoor conditions and they have batteries in them, but they can be powered from external sources as well. So it sounds like they've put some, some thought into the hardware, which is nice for some expandability might've been designed for indoor use and they call it an indoor positioning system, but it sounds like they've planned on some future applications, which is really cool.
00:35:09
Speaker
Yeah, well, I mean, those base stations, depending on the environment, even if they're indoors, they may be subject to you getting banged around. I guess if your warehouse, if you can securely mount them someplace well out of the range of everything, you're good. But if not, they might get bumped into by boxes or machinery or whatever.
00:35:29
Speaker
So you'd probably want them somewhat ruggedized anyhow. And warehouses, and I don't know if this is one of their considerations, but they are big empty spaces and birds fly into them and nest up in the rafters and whatnot. So maybe if it's a bit cold and these are running a little warm because they're powered,
00:35:50
Speaker
birds might have a tendency to make their nests on them and poop all over them. And I think you'd want it a little bit ruggedized if that's going to be the case too. So even though they're for interior use, I can think of some good reasons why you'd want them ruggedized regardless. Yeah, indeed.
00:36:07
Speaker
All right. Well, one of my last little bullet points here mentions, I forgot about this, that when the wind is loud enough to be audible to humans, it affects further distances than say 10 to 20 meters. It says wind errors are actually negligible at 10 to 20 meters from the beacon. If it's mapping something that close, it actually isn't that susceptible to wind. I'd kind of forgotten about that until I just... Good thing we take notes on these. I'd kind of forgotten about that. But
00:36:32
Speaker
when the wind is loud enough to be audible to humans, so you can like hear that wind noise would be my guess, then it affects it at further distances than that 10 to 20 meters. So all right, well, let's go ahead and take another break. And on the other side, we'll talk about a cool case study that they did from a chocolithic site in Israel back in a minute.
00:36:55
Speaker
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00:37:28
Speaker
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00:37:54
Speaker
Hi, welcome back to the Architect Podcast. We're discussing this great little article about a new technique of mapping.
Pilot Project Insights: IPS in Israel
00:38:01
Speaker
Part of what makes this article so great, in my opinion, is that they actually test it on a real project. It's a pilot project within an ongoing archaeological investigation.
00:38:12
Speaker
The site that they're focused on is called Horvat Divshan in Israel. It's north of the Sea of Galilee and it's a calcolithic site. It's from the middle of the 5th millennium BCE to the middle of the 4th millennium BCE. The site itself was identified in the 1970s and had limited excavations going on there since the 2010s. That's all stuff I knew because I read it in the article.
00:38:38
Speaker
The pilot project that they do with this hedgehog and Marvelous Minds, with the hedgehog methodology, this IPS is based in the 2019 season of the excavations. And as a pilot project,
00:38:54
Speaker
it was done alongside their more traditional total station GNSS surveying hardware, so they wanted to compare, which is wonderful again. That's the right way to do it. They didn't jump in with both feet and only rely on this.
00:39:10
Speaker
As we discussed in the first segment, they are fully aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the more traditional systems. It's not like they're going into this blind, which one would expect they wouldn't because they're our field archaeologists. Just like all of us, we've all experienced all these different tools over the years.
00:39:27
Speaker
So they relied on what they normally rely on, but they wanted to see if they could augment it. So what they did is they set rebar into the ground around three trenches, and then they built custom mounts with pipes and 3D printed parts. 3D printed parts, I've been doing that this last week to repair some stuff on some drones, including the one that we use in Lagash. So I like that.
00:39:53
Speaker
That just tickles me that the 3D printing parts in order to test this equipment on their project. So the purpose of setting those rebar points is that they want to ensure consistent placement of their base stations. And as IPS system software is and the software that they had on this,
00:40:13
Speaker
It doesn't generally care about world coordinates. What it cares about is where in that warehouse you are. So it can use a local grid. The software had provisions for tying it into UTMs, into a world grid. But
00:40:29
Speaker
That was a little weird. Maybe we'll talk about that a little more as we get down here. But they wanted to be able to set that out from the get-go that they could do that. So they set the rebar. They had these things. That means that they could bring the base stations home, charge them up at the end of the day, bring them out in the morning, and plant them back in the exact same locations that they were at before. So that also...
00:40:50
Speaker
shows a nice level of forethought. They didn't have to remap them every time. Putting them up on poles, which is what they did, also gave them slightly better line of sight. That was something that I thought was a little interesting. It was only in passing, unless I missed it somewhere when I was reading, is that it looks like this hedgehog system needs line of sight for those sonic signals to actually be usable.
00:41:17
Speaker
Well, that makes sense because it's time of flight measurements they're doing, so it's got to go there and back, right? Yes. Yeah. So that actually, to me, that kind of limits the utility of sound for this. Yeah. Because that's one of the big problems that we have with, like we were saying before, with total station surveying is that some of the best total stations right now that you can get are mirrorless.
00:41:40
Speaker
Mirrorless is almost always useless on an archaeological excavation because you can't see down into the trench. You can't see what you actually want to take that elevation on, so you have to put something up on it. Basically, you take a prism and you put it on the pole, and then you subtract the length of the pole from all your measurements.
00:41:57
Speaker
They had to do the exact same thing with their hedgehog, put it on a pole, but also they mounted their base stations on poles in order to maintain that line of sight. So that's a little bit of a caveat around this whole technology that I'm not sure
00:42:13
Speaker
how it will be addressed because I can also imagine that warehouses, even if you've mounted these base stations up on the ceiling, you're not going to have perfect line of sight to everything that you want to track in that warehouse. Again, beyond the scope of this article and beyond the research I did, but I wonder how that's being accommodated for now.
00:42:31
Speaker
Anyhow, as we said before, there's a modem that collects this data and dumps it to a computer that processes the data. It happens real time. They're talking about the basic standard, the default collection rate for it is eight hertz, so eight times a second.
00:42:51
Speaker
But it can be slowed down and made more accurate. And I think that eight times a second is a ridiculously fast refresh rate for our purposes. And so I would, as a user, I'd rather even go as low as one Hertz and just make sure that I'm not moving ridiculously fast when I'm mapping things.
00:43:14
Speaker
So anyhow, the modem, they connected to a ruggedized Windows computer that they could just kind of, it was a low power one. They could just fire it, close the lid, and leave it aside for the rest of the day. And they would happily chug along processing the data. The Hedgehog, as we mentioned before, was also connected to a computer. In their case, it was a Surface Pro tablet, and that sounds like something they had on the project.
00:43:38
Speaker
that didn't have any direct use at the moment. So they decided to commandeer it for the purposes of this. And they ranked QGIS then on that Surface Pro tablet, collecting the live NMEA data so that they could display it in real time, straight off the hedgehog.
00:43:54
Speaker
So that was really cool that they spelled out exactly what the pieces were. And like I said earlier, I would be curious to find out what you could replace of these computers. Do you need that real-time display? Can you replace that with a data logger and get post-process display at the end of the day? Is that trade-off
00:44:17
Speaker
What are you doing with those data? Even if you're getting the real-time display, you probably still have to process it in some way to get back to the excavator so they can enter, say, point elevations into the notebooks. All this gets to just the experimental nature of not just the technology that they're using, but also how we're going to use it.
00:44:35
Speaker
We're pretty comfortable. They're basic workflows that are used on any given site, and they usually rely on one person that becomes the master of that particular domain, the total station person, the GIS person, the GNSS person, the magnetometry person, whatever.
00:44:53
Speaker
You got to have a good sensible workflow that gets them the data, gets them to process the data and gets them to return that process data to whoever is logging it in whatever format. Even if it's just writing it down in a field notebook, it's got to go through people. And so there are lots of different points that any of these things could have bottlenecks.
IPS Technology Bottlenecks and Solutions
00:45:12
Speaker
And so even though they start out talking about the bottlenecks from the traditional systems, I'm looking at what they're doing here and seeing for myself that there are probably also a few bottlenecks that are just different than before. That's not a deal breaker by any sense, but it does have to be accommodated for. It means it's not a panacea.
00:45:29
Speaker
Yeah. And it sounded like actually that the hedgehog was one of the bigger anomalies for how to set that up because I'm trying to figure out exactly how this thing collects data, right? It seems like it's finding the position of the hedgehog using the ultrasonic beacons. And if the hedgehog is on wheels and can run itself around, then it knows where it hasn't collected data. And I don't know if it bumps into walls and stuff like a Roomba or whatever, but
00:45:57
Speaker
It sounds like the beacons are like, where's the hedgehog? And the hedgehog is reporting its location and, or not reporting, but you know, it's basically triangulating where that thing is. Well, obviously they couldn't use it that way. So they had to sign up. My understanding is that that hedgehog is a passive receiver.
00:46:13
Speaker
Yeah. And eight times a second, it says, how far am I from all the base stations that I can see? Right. And then it radios that to the computer with the modem attached that sees, takes those data, quickly triangulates them, sends that back to the hedgehog,
00:46:35
Speaker
the Hedgehog then formats it as an NMEA string and sends it out the USB port to the logger, to the Surface Pro with QGIS in their case. That's my understanding of how this works. I could well be wrong because it wasn't entirely clear, but if that's the case,
00:46:54
Speaker
processing the triangulation isn't really complicated math. That's something that your handheld GPS receiver does. So you could have a very basic computer and get rid of that whole radio from the hedgehog to the computer or have the computer process and have it send it back to the hedgehog. You could do that with just a small onboard computer. And maybe the company's already done that. But that seems like an extra step in the whole process that
00:47:20
Speaker
is not the way I would design it. That whole radio link is weird to me.
00:47:27
Speaker
Well, and it seemed like too, I mean, the way they had to use this is first off, the hedgehog is really designed to be mobile on its own, right? So the company knows and the system knows where the measuring point is on the hedgehog and it can just run around and do what it needs to do autonomously. But obviously since they couldn't do that, they tried setting it where it goes, but there's no tripod mounting point. There's no steady rod mounting point. There's no,
00:47:51
Speaker
indication on the hedgehog where the actual measurement point is and it's not a super small device so it's somewhere on that device and if you're off you could be off by a few centimeters you know the width of the device or whatever if you don't know where the measuring point is so they basically mounted it to a pole
00:48:06
Speaker
so they could have that line of sight to the beacons. And then I think it says you can put in a Z or a vertical offset so you know how long the pole is. So that can be subtracted from all your measurements. But either way, the thing is not autonomous. So you still kind of have the similar problem as a GPS or a total station, except it's just easier to run, where somebody's got to like run around and drop that hedgehog on different points. Now, the one good thing about this is
00:48:32
Speaker
If it's taking points eight times a second, and I understand why it's doing that because the hedgehogs are actually, if you look at the homepage of this company, really fast little vehicles and it has to be eight times per second when they're moving that quickly, right? Because they're constantly like going back and forth and you can just really map quickly doing that. But obviously a human's not going to move that fast.
00:48:52
Speaker
But it does mean that you could map a lot quicker by moving really rapidly around the site and just continuously moving this thing around. But then I wonder, do you have to stay flush to the ground and say, map these? What if you just pick it up and you throw it over your shoulder and you're walking into a different part of the site? Is it still recording? What do those points look like? You know what I mean? But there seems to be a lot of potential data cleanup that has to be done on this unless you can just
00:49:40
Speaker
also dumb transmitters. And then the hedgehog as a receiver, but it's also transmitting to get that signal back to the computers during the processing. Again, like I said, I would move the processing on board onto the hedgehog. And the logging, maybe you do it out through a USB port to another external device, or you just log it internally. But then I would just have a button on it.
00:49:45
Speaker
flip it on and off real easy.
00:50:03
Speaker
on the hedgehog that when I want to take a point, I would press the button and take the point and then release it when I'm done. Maybe the two buttons, one to take a point, a single point and another one to draw a line. So I hold down the button for a while so I can trace the outline of something, for example.
00:50:22
Speaker
That's how I would go about it. And what they talk about, and they didn't do this because they only had the one hedgehog, but if this is the way the system works, and now we've gotten rid of this bottleneck of transmitting the data back to the processing computer because the processing computer is on board each hedgehog, you could put a hedgehog in each trench and it becomes basically like the tape elevator, a tape measure.
00:50:46
Speaker
for every digger, right? Oh, hey, I need a point elevation here, plop it on the point, take the elevation. I'm not waiting for the total station guy to finish up whatever, to walk back that kilometer from the other side. I'm not waiting for the person that knows how to use the GNSS receiver. I'm not a bottleneck for anybody else in the process. It's true. With just one of these little data recorder loggers,
00:51:13
Speaker
in each trench. Just grab the one, take the point and go. That is true. And that is really nice. We had a similar thing just for elevations.
Innovative Solutions with 3D Printing
00:51:22
Speaker
I've only used it once on a site, but it was a laser level. They'd have to
00:51:28
Speaker
Every day, the platform that the laser level was sitting on was left out at the site. And it was just a flat platform on a leveled, known position. Tripod, right? But they'd take the device in, actually. So when we get out to work in the morning, they would just set it right down on there, make sure it was still level from overnight, turn it on. And then you just had your rod and your measuring device on there. And you could quickly measure pretty much any time you want. That was super cool. So you're right. Something like that would be really nice. But you know what we really need, Paul?
00:51:57
Speaker
We need smart trials and shovels that know their position in space and then you could just
00:52:05
Speaker
The measuring point is at the end of it, and you just know. It's all logged. I don't know how that works, but I'm going to invent it somehow. Another issue that they had is you were talking about this laser level set up over a known point, and that's very common. Every construction site nowadays has something like that.
00:52:30
Speaker
laser level that they'll set up first thing in the morning over the known point, measure the height of it, and then anything that you need an elevation from, you've got a consistent point of reference for everything else. So that's another thing moving from construction to archaeology. And I think that there probably are a number of other tools that would move the same direction.
00:52:52
Speaker
With this system, they set out those base stations on known points so they could always set them up in exactly the same place with the rebar and the poles and the 3D printed brackets. And then they took GPS coordinates on each of those. So they had UTM coordinates and then they could upload that in theory into the processing software so that it could process everything not as a local grid, but as worldwide coordinates.
00:53:20
Speaker
Hopefully this has been fixed since then, but that was a problem that they had repeatedly was how to get that to actually work the way it's supposed to. And it was unclear whether it was not working for them because or it was difficult for them to work because it was poorly documented or if it was poorly implemented or if it was buggy. It may have been all three. Hopefully that's all been fixed by now because we can't be the only ones who want to do something like this with worldwide coordinates as opposed to a local grid.
00:53:51
Speaker
But I don't know how much that matters to companies that are focused entirely on interior spaces. Sure. Yeah, it might not be their target audience right now. All right. Well, I think wrapping this up,
00:54:08
Speaker
The takeaway for me on this is not necessarily even the new technology. It's the archaeologists themselves looking at something that's totally wacky and not built for archaeology at all and saying, can we make this work? And then not only that, but taking it into the field, into Israel,
00:54:25
Speaker
and trying it on a site and saying, what the hell? Let's give it a shot. More people need to do that so we can know one way or another whether or not something is just absolutely not going to work or maybe they concluded in this article, just not ready for prime time yet. It's close. It's getting there. There's a lot of attributes they liked about it, but it's not necessarily something that's ready for everybody to just say, drop everything and buy this.
00:54:51
Speaker
But we do need people to buy it and try it and try some of the other manufacturers out there. And again, this article is written in 2019. The field work was 2019 for this article. So they've had three more years of development, presumably, to do different things with this. And technology like this changes rapidly in that amount of time. So I really applaud them for looking at something like this and then writing up the results in a journal that people have access to, not some obscure thing that nobody's ever seen before.
00:55:22
Speaker
Right. Any other final thoughts from you, Paul, on this? No. I mean, I just echo what you said. It's great that they tried this. You can practically see the light bulb going off over their head when they saw this. But then they went out, I guess the barrier to entry was fairly low because the price is fairly low and that they went ahead and they tried it and then they rode up very forthrightly for us to see what worked and what didn't.
00:55:49
Speaker
I'm actually going to really backtrack here just for a moment, not on anything I just said, but on another point about why they wanted to do this and about that refresh rate. And this is another, not exactly a bottleneck, but it's a potential huge advance for a technology like this that can record rapidly. And that's that with totalization serving software that we wrote back in the 90s in Masca, we used it for drawing, right? So if you want to
00:56:16
Speaker
map in a wall, you could take four points to define the four corners of the wall, or you could take more to get a more detailed view and the software would connect dot to dot.
00:56:27
Speaker
And then we could also take point elevations or whatever, but that dot to dot is fairly limited. If I'm taking four points, it's going to take me no less than a minute and a half, two minutes to take those four points with the total station. And that depends on the distance. It depends how steadily I'm holding the pole. It depends on a lot of things. But each one of those points takes
00:56:50
Speaker
10 seconds or more, then you have to move to the next one and each one and then aim the total station and another 10 seconds or more. So it really adds up. They were using it on this project for tracing the outlines of things. And because it's recording so quickly, they got much, much finer detail than we could with a GNSS unit or total station. So that's, for me, maybe the most exciting thing.
00:57:17
Speaker
in the watch the space department is that in the future, in the not too distant future, we're going to be able to trace features, artifacts, whatever it is in the field as we go, and it's going to be there recorded digitally. Yeah, and that's really cool. That I think is huge, right? It's just the actual application of that that needs to be enhanced a little bit, but the way they were able to do that, that eight minutes, eight times per second comes in handy if you're using it right.
00:57:46
Speaker
All right. Well, with that, take a look at the show notes for this. Just look down at your phone or whatever you're on and look at your computer. If you're still listening to podcasts on computer, I don't know if anybody does. Maybe they do. Maybe they were sitting in their office or something like that. They're listening on Spotify. Who knows? But if you have tried something totally wacky and
00:58:07
Speaker
especially if it didn't work, I want to hear about it. You know what I mean? Like stuff that works is really cool, but if it like didn't work, I really would like to know that too. Cause that's the kind of stuff that doesn't often get published. Like this article here, I don't know if, I mean, they're calling it a success partially, but also it's kind of like some stuff didn't work. And I, that's why I said before, like we really appreciate this kind of article. So
00:58:28
Speaker
Let us know chris at archaeology podcast, network.com. You can hit us up. There's other contact info on the show notes. Paul's on Twitter all the time. If you're a Twitter user, go check that out and reply to this. And, um, he's at, uh, you're at Lugal on Twitter, right? Yep. All right. Sounds good. And with that, I think we will put it off and Paul might squeeze in one more recording before we'll have to find a guest co-host for a couple of months while he's gallivanting in the middle East again. And, uh,
00:58:58
Speaker
But we'll figure it out. We will push on. With that, thank you, everybody. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.
00:59:11
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Archaeotech Podcast. Links to items mentioned on the show are in the show notes at www.archpodnet.com slash archaeotech. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com and paul at lugol.com. Support the show by becoming a member at archpodnet.com slash members. The music is a song called Off Road and is licensed free from Apple. Thanks for listening.
00:59:37
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archapodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
01:00:04
Speaker
Thanks for listening. Please consider joining our growing core of members over at arcpodnet.com slash members. If you liked what you heard, consider leaving a review wherever you're listening to this.