DOCUMENTATION OF COMPLEX ENVIRONMENTS IN CULTURAL HERITAGE SITES. A SLAM-BASED SURVEY IN THE CASTELLO DEL VALENTINO BASEMENT

Underground Built Heritage (UBH) stands out among the existing Cultural Heritage sites as a peculiar scenario. The assets belonging to this type of heritage are typically difficult to manage, exploit, and promote because of a lack of knowledge and documentation. The challenges in documenting built heritage are many and wide-ranging, and the main need must be to provide an accurate and appropriate representation of the surveyed area and its geometric features without employing time-consuming processes. Mobile Mapping Systems (MMSs) are nowadays trending technologies for the geomatics community, proving to be a useful alternative to traditional surveying techniques when taking time and cost constraints into account. The paper focuses on the use of an MMS, the STONEX® X120GO SLAM Laser Scanner system, in documenting a portion of the Castello del Valentino, an articulated and complex architecture located in Turin (Italy). The underground floor of the castle, due to its complexity in terms of accessibility and the challenge it poses for the documentation approach, was chosen as a case study to assess the STONEX® X120GO's capabilities in terms of portability of the instrument, speed of acquisition, as well as completeness and accuracy of the acquired dataset. The results obtained using the MMS technique have been compared to and validated using data from a TLS (Terrestrial Laser Scanner) survey used as a ground reference. The results and considerations reported in this paper demonstrate that MMSs can accurately and completely depict built spaces and their main characteristics and have substantial potential in mapping complex assets.