XYHT Magazine

Near Modena, in northern Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region, it is impossible to separate technology from place. This is Italy’s high-performance automotive heartland, home to Ferrari, Lamborghini, Maserati, Bugatti and Pagani — some of the world’s most admired performance machines. It is also a region of agriculture, vineyards and precision manufacturing. The landscape itself seems to insist that technology should not be abstract. It should be physical, engineered, tested, refined and enjoyed.

Surveyor Shea Gleadle tests GEO-MEASURE over a monument as part of his evaluation of the compact RTK receiver’s precision and repeatability. Credit: 3rd Dimension For Shea Gleadle, the question was straightforward: Can a roughly $700 RTK rover actually produce measurements a professional surveyor can take seriously? For Keita Kobayashi, the question was almost the reverse. He already knew what he wanted to do with software. He needed an easier way to connect that software to the physical world.

At Trimble’s booth during this year’s Esri User Conference in San Diego, the conversation about artificial intelligence started with a crucial distinction. “When we’re talking about artificial intelligence for the asset life cycle, whether it’s construct or operations and maintenance, if you get a hallucination, that could cost millions of dollars,” said Matthew Sprague, a senior Trimble leader in construction, operations, and maintenance technology, who works on the Unity Suite.

More than 15,000 people filled the San Diego Convention Center for Esri’s 46th annual User Conference, with an equivalent number watching the livestream from 117 countries, according to Esri founder and president Jack Dangermond. “The purpose of it is fundamentally all about helping you and helping your work and advancing this community that we live in,” Dangermond told the room.

Topcon Positioning Systems announced it has entered a strategic agreement with GreenValley International (GVI) to collaborate on technologies for surveying, mapping, construction, forestry and other spatial intelligence related applications.

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.