Towards Low-Cost and High Precision: Software Enhanced Terrestrial Laser Scanner Consists of Consumer-Grade Multi-Beam LiDAR and Servo Motor

3D laser scanning technology, as a rapid and non-contact measurement method, enables the acquisition of high-precision 3D data from the real world. It has been widely applied in the Architecture-Engineering-Construction (AEC) industry for quality inspection, project progress management, reverse engineering, and building information modeling. However, the prevalent Terrestrial Laser Scanner (TLS) is often too expensive for widespread use. This paper proposes a low-cost TLS that combines multi-beam LiDAR with a high-precision servo motor. The LiDAR is driven by a motor to rotate, accumulating point clouds at different angles and generating dense point clouds. By employing software enhancements such as data time synchronization, calibration, and post-processing of point clouds, we improve the precision of the measurement results. Additionally, we extract planar elements (ceilings, floors, and walls) from the data obtained by the scanner in indoor environments, facilitating subsequent applications and processing. Through a series of qualitative and quantitative experiments, we have demonstrated that our system can achieve measurement data with an error average of 1 cm compared to commercial TLS while maintaining significantly lower costs.