Focus Of Research

Research activities at the Geodetic Institute (GIK) focus on the fields of Geodesy and Geoinformatics, and range from basic research to the development and application of new technologies. Students have the opportunity to get involved and participate in research very early on in their studies. Research at the Geodetic Institute is closely associated with the KIT Centre for "Climate and Environment" as well as the Gradute School KIT-GRACE.

The Geodetic Institute is divided into three departments that define the key research areas:

The research focus in Geoinformatics is currently particularly concerned with the development of methods for spatio-temporal geodata management, the further development of 3D/4D geoinformation systems and the investigation of topological questions for applications in the natural and built environment. The management of Big Geospatial Data is also investigated. Furthermore, methods for communication and data management in geosensor networks are currently being researched. Finally, practical applications in the research field of mobile geoinformation systems are being tested at the Department of Geoinformatics.

In the research field Geodetic Sensor Systems, sensors of the same type and / or of different types are used within sensor systems to implement the three core tasks of geodetic engineering – the acquisition, the staking out and the monitoring. For this purpose, a robot platform is being developed at the institute, which is intended to autonomously solve the first two subtasks with high precision. In the field of monitoring, the focus is on area-based measurement techniques such as terrestrial laser scanning. In this research field, strategies for modelling the acquired point clouds are being researched and, based on this, models for describing deformations are being developed.

Research undertaken in the field of Geodetic Earth System Sciences mainly concentrates on the building of models for the evaluation of satellite and terrestrial geodetic measurements as well as their application in geodynamics. Measurement technology is a major focus of Satellite Geodesy. The use of geodetic GPS is another research area as well as GPS observation methods for polar research. Physical Geodesy focuses mainly on issues of boundary values and problems in association with vertical datums.