Guo Liqun, a senior engineer of a surveying and mapping group of the Shenyang Military Area Command, and his three-people research team led by him won six Military Scientific and Technological Progress Awards in one year. Guo said, " The achievement is attributable to the changes the group has gone through as a result of intensifying its efforts in IT application."
The first project the team had applied for in its research in the early 1980s was to "replace the topography map techniques of using wet boards by SO film". At that time, related reference materials were not available let alone the required experimental conditions. To borrow reference materials, he had to go to many places and talk to many people in order to tackle the key problems. He and his colleagues spent six years to persuade the printing industry to accept their newly achieved technology of map printing.
Over the recent years, the surveying group was equipped with dozens of new equipment including "target image vehicles for field operations", marking the end of manual scribed and plotted maps which are replaced by the ones mainly produced by using modern technologies. In the past, it took one day for four people to finish surveying one site. Presently, it takes only 40 minutes for just two people to do the job.
At the same time, the group has also set up an urgent mapping element and developed a support vehicle for mapping in field operations and a digital mapping system for field work, thus greatly enhanced its capability in quick support. According to the leaders of the surveying group, in the past it could only make ordinary maps, now it can make maps that are with fluorescent coloring, waterproof maps and dynamic maps. The replacement cycles are shortened, from several years even more then 10 years in the past, to one year in which new maps are produced and delivered to troops.
By Niu Shiying and Sun Haidong
(May 26, PLA Daily)
