Mowing and measuring in one pass with Leica MC1

Author: Reka Vasszi

In the Netherlands, water is never simply there. It is moved, held back, let through, and measured every day, across a network of ditches, canals, and watercourses. Waterschap Drents Overijsselse Delta looks after one of those networks, and its job is deceptively simple to state: get the water away when there is too much of it, and get it there when there isn't.

Doing that well depends on knowing the shape of every watercourse: how deep, how wide, how much it can carry. That data used to arrive roughly once every eight years. Today, 19 of the water authority's maintenance excavators collect it while they mow, and the water system is refreshed two to three times a year.

The challenge: managing a water system on eight-year-old data

Almost everything the organisation plans, calculates, and executes rests on the flow profiles of its watercourses. Yet keeping those profiles current meant sending people out to measure by hand: slow, expensive, and easy to get wrong.

The solution: the machine that maintains the ditch also measures it

Rather than adding a survey task to an already full maintenance programme, the water authority made the maintenance itself the survey. Each excavator was fitted with the Leica MC1 machine control system, sensors and GNSS positioning, so that the same pass that clears the watercourse also records its profile.

Here is how it works at Drents Overijsselse Delta:

• Nineteen maintenance excavators are equipped with Leica MC1, sensors and GNSS positioning, all fully operational
• The operator presses one button to engage the mowing bucket; the same button starts the measuring system
• As the bucket follows the bed of the ditch, depth and width are recorded automatically, pass by pass
• Measurement data flows straight to the connected cloud, where it is immediately visible
• A data engineering partner pulls that data out via API and turns it into information products for end users inside the water authority
• Aquatic plants and silt are removed in the same operation; the maintenance job is unchanged

A new colleague in the cab

For the operators, the day did not get harder; it got more interesting. The machine handles the data capture; they keep doing the work they already know how to do, and the measuring comes along for the ride.

"It makes the work more exciting for the operators. They are not only busy mowing the waterways, but they are also generating data. And I see the new system as a new colleague in the cab."
_{— Bertwin Post, Water Authority Drents Overijsselse Delta}

No extra hours, and fewer hands in the water

The economics of the project rest on a single point: the measurement is free, because it happens inside work that was already scheduled. There is no separate survey crew, no second visit, no extra shift.

"Safety has improved as the machine collects all data in one operation and we no longer have to do manual measurements that are quite labour-intensive."

From the theoretical water system to the real one

The change the organisation notices most is not the technology. It is that the map on the screen and the ditch in the field are finally the same thing.

"Previously, we had data that was measured once every few years, so in terms of eight years. Now we have data that is up to date. We now measure two or three times in a year a canal or a watercourse. This gives us a direct picture of our practical water system outside."
_{— Sander van 't Klooster, Project Manager, Water Authority Drents Overijsselse Delta}

With current profiles across the network, questions that used to require fieldwork and estimation can be answered from the desk:

• How much water can this watercourse take in, and how much can it discharge?
• What happens here when it rains hard, and where does that put us at risk of flooding?
• Where in our area are we exposed to water shortage in a dry spell?
• What is the actual depth and width out there, as opposed to the design?
• Where should dredging go next winter, based on what we measured this summer?

Dual stick: supporting the attachments Dutch waterways actually need

Waterway maintenance in the Netherlands is not a single-bucket job. Mowing buckets, dredging buckets, and additional stick configurations are all part of normal operation, and a machine control system that only supports a standard setup is of limited use. The Leica MC1 dual stick solution was developed to cover exactly this.

"For the maintenance of the waterways in the Netherlands, you need more attachments than might normally be standard. But in the new version of MC1 we can support those extra attachments, so that you can simply use the entire MC1 system, including all those attachments."
_{— Jan Van Groesen, Sales Engineer at Leica Geosystems}

Speaking on site, the Leica Geosystems team put the capability more bluntly:

"We are currently the only supplier of machine control systems that support so many moving attachments."
_{— Jan Van Groesen, Sales Engineer at Leica Geosystems}