Design and calibration of a rotating laser transmitter for fast and high-precision laser self-levelling system

•Fast and high-precision rotating laser self-levelling system is presented.•High-precision solid tilt sensor is utilized to reduce the delay of obtaining tilt data.•The developed self-levelling algorithm is used to improve the levelling efficiency.•Efficient digital error compensation method is proposed to increase levelling accuracy.•Experimental results show that overall levelling error is controlled within 10″ in 4–15 s.