If you look at engineers building a massive highway or a huge bridge, you will often see them staring into a yellow robotic camera mounted on a tripod. This highly advanced instrument is called an EDM (Electronic Distance Measurement) device.
One of the most famous and historical types of EDM is called a Distomat.
Primary Purpose: To instantly and accurately measure massive land distances for civil engineering and map-making.
Working Principle: Shoots an infrared laser beam at a mirror prism and calculates the time it takes to return.
Category: It belongs to the EDM (Electronic Distance Measurement) family of tools.
Accuracy: Can measure a distance of 5 kilometers with an error margin of less than 2 millimeters.
The absolute primary purpose of a Distomat is to measure incredibly long physical distances with extreme, millimeter-level accuracy without using a physical measuring tape. In the old days, civil engineers had to manually drag a 100-meter steel chain across rivers and mountains to measure land, which took hours and was highly inaccurate. Today, a Distomat completely solves this problem instantly.
A Distomat is a brilliant application of Physics. It works on the principle of sending and receiving electromagnetic waves (usually Infrared Lasers).
While the name 'Distomat' was heavily used in the 1980s and 90s (originally invented by the Swiss company WILD), modern civil engineers now use a more advanced machine called a 'Total Station', which is essentially a Distomat combined with a digital angle-measuring theodolite into one single robotic super-computer.
A distomat is a surveying instrument used by civil engineers to instantly and highly accurately measure the massive physical distance between two points on the ground.
It shoots an invisible infrared laser beam at a glass prism far away. By calculating the exact micro-second the laser takes to bounce back, its internal computer instantly calculates the distance.
Today, the standalone Distomat has been fully replaced by the highly advanced 'Total Station', which combines distance measuring and angle measuring into one single robotic machine.
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