3.5 Data Centers
Data centers combine every challenging environment in a single building: long repetitive aisles, dense metallic geometry, low ambient feature variation, and the requirement to rescan the same space accurately every few months as infrastructure changes. Standard technique works here, but only if it is applied with the right structure from the start.
Why Data Centers Get Rescanned
A data center floor plan from commissioning is typically wrong within six months. Servers are swapped, racks are reconfigured, cabling routes change, and cooling infrastructure shifts to accommodate new loads. Static drawings do not keep pace with this. Periodic scanning produces a verified digital twin that reflects the space as it actually exists, not as it was documented at build.
Accurate As-Built Documentation
Traditional drawings are routinely incomplete or incorrect for cabling routes, rack positions, cooling infrastructure, and power distribution. A scan captures all of it, physical geometry, cable trays, rack fill levels, at the accuracy level required for renovation planning, capacity expansion, and compliance audits.
Infrastructure Change Tracking
Server additions and removals, fiber and power cabling upgrades, rack reconfiguration, and airflow adjustments happen on cycles of three to six months at active sites. Each rescan produces a verified record of what changed, prevents clashes during future maintenance, and gives operations teams the current state without relying on manual tracking.
Cabling and Capacity Management
Dense cable runs, power, fiber, copper, are nearly impossible to document manually with any accuracy. Scans document exact routes, cable tray fill levels, and physical connectivity in three dimensions, supporting troubleshooting, failover planning, and capacity forecasting across the facility lifecycle.
Change Detection and Digital Twins
Comparing a rescan to the baseline dataset automatically identifies what moved, what was added, and what was removed. This supports verification of contractor work, detection of unauthorized changes, and ongoing BIM model updates that keep the facility record current for lifecycle management.
What Makes Data Centers Hard to Scan
Data centers share several properties that each apply pressure to SLAM tracking in different ways. Understanding them before planning the scan is how you avoid discovering the problems during processing.
Geometric repetition. Every aisle between rows looks nearly identical to every other aisle. The LiDAR sees the same wall-to-wall geometry repeating at regular intervals for the full length of the hall. Without additional reference features, the system has limited material to distinguish one position from another, and drift accumulates faster than in environments with varied geometry.
Low visual texture. Rack faces, raised floors, and metal ceilings provide limited visual feature variation. The visual SLAM component relies on texture to match frames, flat, uniform surfaces offer very little. In the worst case, a freshly painted server hall with identical black rack fronts on both sides provides almost no visual anchoring at all.
No GPS. RTK does not achieve Fixed status inside a building. All absolute georeferencing must come from ground control points with surveyed coordinates. If the facility needs to be tied to a real-world coordinate system, for BIM integration or campus-scale consistency, the control point survey is the only path to get there.
Live equipment. Scanning around powered racks requires care with the device, limits where targets can be placed, and means the environment may include small vibration sources and heat gradients that affect air quality in ways that can introduce minor scan noise near hot-aisle vents.
Scanning Technique
Modular Capture by Pod or Section
Do not scan the entire hall floor in a single continuous session. Break it into logical sections, two to four rows per session, or by structural pod boundaries if the facility uses that layout. Shorter sessions reduce per-session drift accumulation, allow targeted rescans of only the zones that changed, and keep individual file sizes within reliable processing limits.
Scan the main cross-aisle or backbone corridor first, then branch into individual aisles from it. This mirrors the backbone-first approach that works in any building, and for the same reason: every aisle entry and exit back to the corridor creates a loop closure, continuously correcting drift rather than letting it accumulate across the full session length.
Aisle Pattern
Walk each aisle in a serpentine or ladder pattern rather than a straight centerline pass. A serpentine path weaves from hot-aisle to cold-aisle side at a steady pace, capturing rack faces from opposing angles on adjacent passes. This produces overlapping coverage that supports more reliable tracking than a single midline pass through a uniform-geometry corridor.
At each end of every aisle, walk a small figure-eight or loop before reversing. These intersections are the primary loop closure opportunities in the data center environment, use every one of them rather than turning sharply and reversing course.
Height Variation
Vary the device height between passes where practical. A pass at chest height followed by a pass at above-head height captures top-of-rack geometry and overhead cable tray routes that a single-height pass misses. Height changes must be gradual, no more than 40 degrees of viewing angle change at any one moment, so transition between heights over several feet of travel rather than in a single step.
Speed in data center aisles should be treated as an indoor hallway environment throughout: 1.5 ft/s maximum. The proximity of rack faces on both sides, combined with low visual texture and repetitive LiDAR geometry, makes this one of the more demanding SLAM environments for a mobile scanner. There is no speed at which quality improves by moving faster through a rack aisle.
Using XGRIDS Targets in Data Centers
The steel base plate targets that ship with the K1 and L2 Pro are well suited to data centers. They are magnetic, which allows them to attach directly to rack frames and metal surfaces without adhesive, and their high-contrast geometry creates unambiguous features in environments where everything else looks the same.
In a feature-poor aisle environment, a target placed at the end of a row gives the SLAM system a specific, high-contrast reference point it can reliably match between scan segments and sessions. Marking it in LixelGO creates a logged anchor in the trajectory that LixelStudio uses for both loop closure correction and, if surveyed coordinates are supplied, georeferencing.
As SLAM Anchors
Place targets at aisle ends, row intersections, and pod corners, locations that naturally serve as loop closure points in the scan route. When the scanner passes the same target from multiple directions across a session, SLAM uses it as a reliable, unambiguous feature match. This is most effective in long aisles where feature variation is otherwise minimal throughout.
For Repeatable Rescans
Magnetic targets re-placed on the same rack frame position each visit produce rescan alignment that does not require manual registration in post-processing. Mark the same point names in each scan session, and LixelStudio aligns them by residuals automatically. The rack frame attachment point does not need to be marked permanently, it just needs to be the same physical location each time.
For Absolute Georeferencing
Survey each target position with a total station or RTK rover from an exterior control network, then create a coordinate CSV with those positions. Load it into LixelStudio during processing and the software computes residuals and transforms the entire point cloud to real-world coordinates. This approach ties the indoor scan to the same coordinate system used for campus-level or BIM work.
Target Placement Strategy
Placement Rules
Spacing
One target per three to five aisles, or approximately every 100 to 165 feet along the scan path, consistent with the L2 Pro's 330-foot and K1's 165-foot maximum GCP spacing requirements.
Distribution
Distribute targets at varying heights, floor level, mid-rack, and top-of-rack, to create a three-dimensional control network. Points that are all at the same height provide only two-dimensional constraint. Points cannot all be collinear.
Visibility
Place each target where the scanner can approach within 3 to 6 feet and circle it during the scan. A target attached to the back of a rack where the scan path never passes is not effective. Confirm each target is visible from the planned scan route before the session begins.
Keep targets away from hot-aisle vents and active airflow paths. Turbulent air near high-output cooling exhaust can cause minor vibration in loosely-placed targets. Magnetic attachment directly to a rack upright rather than to a removable panel provides the most stable placement around live equipment.
Rescan Alignment
The value of periodic scanning compounds when each rescan aligns precisely to the baseline without manual registration work. The target network enables this, but the scan route must also be consistent between sessions.
- Always re-occupy the same control points across sessions. Re-place magnetic targets on the same rack attachment points used in the baseline scan, mark them with the same point names, and LixelStudio will align the new session to the baseline via residuals automatically
- Start and end loops in unchanged areas. Begin and end each rescan session in a corridor or zone that was not modified since the baseline. The geometry in that area matches the original scan and provides the initial and final loop closure reference that anchors the new session to the existing dataset
- Scan only the sections that changed where possible. A targeted rescan of two modified rows, anchored to unchanged corridor geometry on both ends, produces a precisely aligned result without rescanning the full hall. Map Fusion connects the new segment to the existing baseline using shared overlap area and control point names
- Overlap between sessions must be at least 50 feet of shared scanned area, the same Map Fusion requirement that applies to any multi-segment project. Plan rescan boundaries so that the new session covers at least 50 feet of geometry that is also present in the session it must merge with
- Verify residuals before leaving site. LixelStudio's residual report shows how closely the control points aligned between sessions. A residual above your project tolerance, typically 2 cm or less for BIM-grade work, means something in the target placement or scan route needs to be checked before the session data is accepted
For campus-scale data center facilities where the interior scan must register to an exterior coordinate network, the most reliable long-term approach is a permanent survey control network: floor nails or embedded anchors at surveyed positions, supplemented by removable magnetic targets at rack positions for session-to-session alignment. The permanent anchors hold the coordinate frame across years. The removable targets handle the routine rescan alignment between anchor visits.
Scan Cadence
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