XYHT Magazine

This entry is part 6 of 6 in the series May / June 2026 The line is funny, but it is also revealing. In one sentence, it captures fatigue, trust, relief, and the deeper logic of the deal: this was not a disappearance, but a refocusing. Grayson made clear that he would stay close to product strategy and the gaps he still wanted to solve, while the day-to-day trench warfare of leadership would shift elsewhere. That distinction matters because the acquisition is not the real story here.

This entry is part 5 of 5 in the series May / June 2026 Tetra Tech is one of the largest engineering and technical services firms in the United States, a publicly traded company with operations spanning water, environment, energy, and infrastructure that employs roughly 28,000 people worldwide. Inside that sprawling enterprise, individual operating groups retain considerable identity and technical autonomy.

This entry is part 7 of 7 in the series March/April 2026 “We are embedded in a lot of products that people just don’t even realize,” Lee said. That is true in directions far beyond geospatial: diagnostic imaging systems in hospitals, quality inspection cameras in consumer-electronics factories, aerospace and defense systems. But it is especially revealing in mobile mapping, where it clarifies the company’s commercial logic. Teledyne FLIR IIS is not selling the final deliverable.

This entry is part 4 of 4 in the series May / June 2026 Image: Messe Dusseldorf/XPONENTIAL The unmanned systems industry has spent a decade getting very good at one thing: flying. The airframes are capable, the sensors are capable, and the regulatory framework, while still evolving, is no longer the primary bottleneck it was in 2015. That part, broadly, is solved.

This entry is part 4 of 4 in the series May / June 2026 When Pix4D was founded in 2011 as a spinout from EPFL’s Computer Vision Lab in Lausanne, the pitch was essentially this: drones are coming, and someone has to turn the images they collect into something surveyors can use.

This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series May / June 2026 Unmanned aircraft systems are increasingly used to document hard-to-reach bridge components, turning inspection imagery into part of the bridge condition record. Credit: U.S. Department of Transportation / Federal Highway Administration. A surveyor flying a bridge deck, a GIS technician cataloging post-storm damage, a mapping firm delivering obliques to an insurer: none of them would describe their work as producing evidence.

This entry is part 2 of 2 in the series May / June 2026 A colorized LiDAR point cloud of the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge in Wilmington, North Carolina, showing the bridge’s vertical lift span, towers and surrounding structures captured as part of McKim & Creed’s survey-grade 3D model. Courtesy of McKim & Creed. No lane closures. No overnight crews in reflective vests. No targets bolted to deck surfaces. No personnel standing on live structures.

This entry is part 1 of 1 in the series May / June 2026 A digital still image overlaid on a lidar point cloud gives the dataset a realistic 3D appearance. Photo/visualization: Joshua Logan, USGS Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center. For most of its history, the private geospatial services firm has been defined by what it delivers: orthophotos, LiDAR point clouds, photogrammetric products, hydrographic surveys, corridor maps. The deliverable was the relationship.

This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series March/April 2026 Image: Leica Geosystems/Hexagon Airborne bathymetric lidar has always been a physics argument. The physics are largely fixed: green laser light at 532 nanometers penetrates water in ways that infrared does not, but the water column itself attenuates the signal, and the degree of that attenuation varies with turbidity, depth, seabed reflectance and surface state.

This entry is part 2 of 2 in the series March/April 2026 It’s a core philosophy of Philadelphia-based Exyn Technologies, a leading developer of autonomous LiDAR-based mapping systems. The company builds systems that navigate and capture data in GNSS-denied environments—underground mines, bridge substructures, confined industrial spaces—where conventional positioning solutions fail and traditional survey methods can be dangerous, slow, or impossible.