From Historic Industrial Building to Digital Asset: SHARE SLAM S20 Builds a 3D Point Cloud Archive for an Old Power Plant in Macau

Handheld SLAM and drone-based data acquisition work together to efficiently capture indoor and outdoor spatial data for a complex power plant environment.

Exterior environment and overall site layout of the old power plant in Macau.

Project Overview: Creating a Long-Term Digital Archive for an Old Power Plant

Built in the 1970s, the power plant in Macau has been operating for decades and carries important industrial and urban energy memories. As the demand for digital management of industrial buildings continues to grow, the customer needed to capture the current condition of the existing power plant buildings, site roads, facades, and interior spaces. The goal was to transform the physical site into a digital archive that can be preserved, reviewed, and reused over the long term.

For this project, the SHARE3DCAM technical team adopted an integrated data acquisition workflow using the SHARE SLAM S20 3D LiDAR scanner and the DJI Matrice 4 E drone. The team captured 3D data from building exteriors, factory hall interiors, rooftops, and surrounding road environments. The final deliverable was a complete point cloud model containing both handheld SLAM point clouds and drone point clouds, providing a high-quality 3D data foundation for the customer's digital archive.

Project Background: Preserving a Historic Power Plant as a Digital Record

The power plant was built in the 1970s, and the buildings have a long operational history. Over time, the buildings, roads, interior structures, and on-site infrastructure need to be systematically recorded and preserved.

Traditional photos, videos, or 2D drawings can document part of the site information, but for complex industrial buildings, many spatial relationships cannot be fully represented. Building facades, elevated structures, indoor pipelines, equipment foundations, and road connections all require more complete and three-dimensional data support.

Through 3D laser scanning, the current condition of the power plant can be recorded in detail. The site, shaped by decades of operation, is converted into point cloud data and incorporated into a digital archive system, supporting future review, management, maintenance, and spatial verification.

Site Challenges: Large Indoor and Outdoor Areas with Complex Industrial Structures

Power plant environments are very different from ordinary building spaces, and the site presented a high level of data acquisition complexity.

First, the exterior area of the power plant was large. The handheld scanning work covered the facades of seven power plant buildings, the interior of one large factory hall, and road areas. At the same time, drone data was needed to cover rooftops and a larger site area. A single device or single perspective would not be sufficient to capture all necessary areas.

Second, the interior of the plant was structurally complex. The site contained a large number of pipelines, equipment foundations, and industrial facilities. Occlusions were common, and the spatial relationships among passages, equipment, and structures were dense. During scanning, the team needed to maintain data completeness while avoiding disruption to the normal operation of the plant's internal equipment.

In addition, as an industrial site, the project required attention to efficiency, safety, and data quality. Completing large-scale indoor and outdoor data acquisition within a limited time while reducing manual point cloud registration work was a key requirement.

The interior of the power plant includes complex equipment, pipelines, and infrastructure.

Solution: Integrated Data Acquisition with SHARE SLAM S20 and DJI Matrice 4 E

To meet the requirement for both indoor and outdoor spatial data acquisition, the project used a combined workflow with the SHARE SLAM S20 3D LiDAR scanner and the DJI Matrice 4 E drone.

SHARE SLAM S20 was mainly used for close-range 3D scanning of building facades, factory hall interiors, and road areas. The handheld SLAM workflow provides high flexibility, making it suitable for rapid data capture inside factory halls, around equipment, in pipeline-dense areas, and across road spaces. It can effectively handle complex industrial environments with many occlusions.

DJI Matrice 4 E was used to capture rooftops and the wider plant environment, supplementing areas that were difficult to cover from ground level. This enabled complementary data acquisition from ground to elevated areas, from building facades to the overall site environment.

By combining handheld scanning and drone data, the project achieved multi-dimensional coverage of indoor areas, outdoor areas, rooftops, and road environments, providing a reliable data foundation for generating a complete point cloud model.

On-site scanning with SHARE SLAM S20 for close-range 3D data acquisition.

Operational Efficiency: One-Person Workflow with Approximately 70 Minutes of Handheld Scanning

In this project, the field operation was completed by one person. Handheld indoor and outdoor scanning with SHARE SLAM S20 took approximately 70 minutes, while drone data acquisition with DJI Matrice 4 E took approximately 40 minutes of flight time.

The handheld point cloud covered an actual area of approximately 20,000 square meters, with an effective coverage area of more than 16,000 square meters. Combined with drone acquisition, the overall coverage reached approximately 70,000 square meters.

During data acquisition, RTK-fused collection was enabled, allowing data to be naturally stitched together and reducing the need for extensive manual registration and post-processing intervention. For large-scale industrial scenes, this workflow significantly improves both field acquisition efficiency and subsequent data processing efficiency.

Project Data Overview

Deliverables: An Integrated Indoor and Outdoor Point Cloud Model of the Power Plant

The final project deliverable was a complete point cloud model containing both drone point clouds and handheld SLAM point clouds.

The resulting data records the interior facilities of the power plant in detail, including pipelines, equipment, and spatial relationships. Exterior buildings, roads, and site markings are also clearly preserved, providing a visual, measurable, and reviewable 3D data foundation for digital archive management.

Compared with traditional 2D records, the point cloud model preserves spatial relationships more completely. In the future, the customer can use this data for space review, historical archiving, building condition verification, and other digital management applications.

Integrated indoor and outdoor point cloud model of the power plant.

Project Value: Turning an Industrial Site into a Digital Asset

The Macau power plant scanning project was not only a spatial data acquisition task for an industrial building, but also a practical example of how 3D scanning can support the digital archiving of aging industrial facilities.

For a power plant with a long history, complex structures, and a large spatial scope, 3D laser scanning can quickly and completely record the actual site condition, reduce the risk of missing information during manual measurement, and improve data acquisition efficiency. At the same time, the integrated workflow of SHARE SLAM S20 and DJI Matrice 4 E makes indoor-outdoor digital documentation more achievable.

Through this project, the power plant was transformed into a long-term 3D point cloud archive. Whether used for documentation, spatial review, future maintenance, or digital management, this data will become an important spatial data asset.

Conclusion

In the digital transformation of industrial buildings, accurate, complete, and efficient spatial data acquisition is a foundational step. For power plant environments with complex indoor and outdoor structures, dense equipment, and large coverage areas, SHARE3DCAM's 3D scanning workflow combines SHARE SLAM S20 handheld 3D laser scanning with DJI Matrice 4 E drone acquisition to achieve large-scale, multi-perspective, and efficient data capture.

From the physical site to point cloud data, and from industrial building to digital archive, SHARE3DCAM will continue to support industrial scenarios in building reliable 3D spatial data foundations for buildings, factories, and infrastructure assets.